There’s a lot I haven’t been telling you, but I’ll tell you (most) everything now.

Reveal 1: My larger tumors started swiftly regrowing even though the smaller ones kept shrinking. We saw this first on a CT scan in February and it was dramatically confirmed in a PT/CT in April. This wasn’t a surprise to Molly and I as we saw my quality of life was backsliding. Many of the odd symptoms I had before my diagnosis had resumed and they were getting worse week by week. I was rapidly losing weight because my stomach was likely contained by the…

Sat April 9th, 2016

Emergency room MD: “You’re cancelling your Hawaii trip. Scans show a number of lumps on your organs. We’re going to check you into the hospital immediately. Looks like Lymphoma. [I later figured out this was code for “we sure hope it’s lymphoma, because that's much more treatable than metastatic carcinoma.”] I told our Hawaii friends we couldn’t make it, huddled with family, got more scans and cell samples at the hospital and hid at home from the world and my future.

Tuesday April 14th

My sister, a pediatric hematology oncologist that lives in Philly with her family, flies out to be with us…

I wanted to speak more about a life trap I fell into and many others do too. The trap is to think that you have a good chance of living into your eighties. When I turned 40, I remember thinking, “well at least I have a whole second half of life to live.” Turns out my clock almost got punched just 6 years later. And in hindsight, 6 years now feels like a full lifetime to me once I came to terms with 6 months might be all I get. And yet in 4 months this year I had more…

I met today with my Symtpoms Management Nurse Practicioner. She’s been amazingly thoughtful and thorough even though the very first time we met I gave her a bunch of “I’m so fucking sick, you think you can help me?” attitude. But if course she did. Dramatically, so.

So I always like our monthly meetings. At this point in my fight I’ve been up and active, though in a weakened state, for over 2 months. I’m two plus days into being opiod-free, but I still take an anti-anxiety and cannabis to help with the withdrawal, and a daily anti-depressant because it…

This post is going to be a mess … suitably as I’m in a bit of a mess. I’m finding living with cancer, versus fighting it, is trickier than I thought. I thought that since I recovered so quickly from a death spiral to being up and about that I’d continue on to achieve a full recovery at the same rate. But I’m still bouncing around at about the same state of recovery as I was in mid-August. An important reality is that my treatment doesn’t kill cancer or put it in a state of remission, it just does an…

Humans on the Move, is a new group bringing together viable strategies for managing the globe’s refugee problems through enterprise, creativity, and investment within the existing civil society, philanthropy, and business ecosystems. New and retooled technology solutions are a critical component, specifically technology that works under the inconceivable demands of people without countries, carrying a bag of possessions or less, using shared phones, often without reliable electricity, internet access, shelter or weather protection. Tools made in Western labs or hackathons are usually flops when they meet the brutal demands of refugee camps, no electricity or carrier access, sea crossings, border…

My life is in a state of mental whiplash and I barely even realized it. In barely 4 months I’ve gone from being in a death spiral to riding my bike to see friends. I went from planning out my funeral to thinking about when I would start working again. I’ve gone from thinking I’d never step foot in my daughters new school to signing up for multiple volunteering slots.

[Before going further I have to share how profoundly grateful I am to all the researchers, doctors and test patients that led to my immunological treatment being available to little…