Tonight I rewatched Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity and understood for the first time why Laura loved it so. I didn’t get it originally. I just thought the acting and special effects were good, but the story was implausible (Sandra Bullock didn’t have one scratch from all the space debris, and those helpful space stations kept materializing…
Tag: Cancer
Farewell Junior
In My Last Summer this week, one of the five terminally ill patients, Junior, suddenly died. He started to bleed profusely from his cancer tumor and his pain shot up so much the hospital told him he was too ill to go out and celebrate his 49th birthday. His fearless partner Sonia ignored the advice,…
Loss
Peter Bach, a Memorial Sloan Kettering epidemiologist, lost his wife Ruth to cancer the same month that Laura died. In last week’s New York magazine he wrote eloquently about his loss. ‘Our life together was gone, and carrying on without her was exactly that, without her. I was reminded of our friend Liz’s insight after…
Into the arms of love
During her last weeks, Laura started to talk about how she knew she would soon see her father, grandmother and her beloved cat ‘Puddy’ again. She had never talked about the afterlife before and I was surprised and pleased she was so filled with excitement about what would happen. For my part, I’ve come to…
What a difference a year makes
This time last year, Laura and I had no inkling she was sick. There were a few clues, but we missed them. During 2012, she had binged a lot on sugar and put on a lot of weight (some experts say that cancer tumors feed on sugar). During the summer of 2012, Laura’s blood work…
Gerson Revisited – part three
How many enemas & juices are enough? ‘In the beginning the most important part of the therapy is an intensive detoxification of the entire body,’ wrote Dr Max Gerson in A Cancer Therapy (p193). To achieve this, Dr Gerson immediately started his cancer patients on the full protocol of 13 juices and 5 enemas each day….
Gerson Revisited – part two
Laura and I really believed in the Gerson diet and its power to cure cancer and other diseases (we have friends from the clinic currently on the diet who are doing well – bravo, bravo. bravo!!!!). But the founder of the diet Dr Max Gerson is long dead, and his wonderful daughter Charlotte (who we…
Gerson Revisited – part one
After Laura died a couple of people sniffed, ‘Well we knew the Gerson diet wouldn’t work. Carrots and enemas – how could it?’ Other people have asked what I think in hindsight about the Gerson Technique. So here goes – Pain + Stamina – The doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering told us that doing the…
Love Is All That Matters
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross helped create the US hospice movement (she was opposed to euthanasia because ‘it doesn’t allow people time to complete their unfinished business.’). Her book Life Lessons contains what she learned by sitting at the bedside of the dying. Here are a few of my favorite quotes – ‘Love is all that matters. Love is…
Post Traumatic Stress
Every night I wake up multiple times out of nightmares in which I am frantically running around performing multiple tasks to hold at bay some faceless enemy. I never win or lose, I just battle on and on until I wake up. The nightmares started when Laura was in hospital. I kept thinking that as…
Doggie Love
Laura LOVED dogs. She spent the last 4 years of her life photographing them and took up grooming so she could spend extra hours playing with her furry friends. ‘All I had to do was love them. I didn’t have to be special. I didn’t have to have a great resume or anything for them…
When will there be good news?
Laura – Lucie picked up the full report of my PET/CT scan on Monday and we found the tumors spread much worse than we thought. The doctor didn’t tell us on the phone how bad it was. The cancer spread to most of my organs and my bones. Mucosal melanoma is the most aggressive cancer…
The Cancer Doctor
Laura – I went again to one of the “best cancer hospitals” this Friday. It’s a joke to me since they haven’t anything healthy to offer me. I saw the chemo doctor. I had to, since I needed to schedule a full body PET Scan which I will have today at 8 AM. I told…
Fever + Cancer
Laura’s has had an unimaginably hard week what with her on/off fever, rigors, drenching sweats (three nights in a row), coughing and vomiting. Yesterday, at the suggestion of her oncologist, we visited a local urgent care unit for a chest x-ray. It showed no metastasis (YHEA!!!!!!) and no sign of pneumonia (which the oncologist feared)….
Soul Love Forever 