Two friends recently expressed surprise when I mentioned that Laura posted quite a bit in the early days of this blog. So I’ve created a special link to all of ‘Laura’s Posts’ (you reach it by clicking the menu icon – looks like a bunch of layers – on the top right hand side of…
Tag: mucosal melanoma
Through a Glass Darkly
‘What I’ve learned is that I’ve so much more to Learn’ -Maya Angelou. I couldn’t agree more. These past 8 months it is as if a whole other world has opened up to me. The life I am living now suddenly seems like a tiny walk on part within an elaborate play cycle that spans centuries…
Mucosal Melanoma: Celebrating the Survivors
Today is the one year anniversary of the day that Laura was rushed to Beth Israel Hospital to see a top cancer specialist. On a routine exam in the morning her gynecologist found a golf ball size mass in her vagina. Two days later we were told it was mucosal melanoma. 11 days later we…
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 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…
Having Hope
Laura – We are planning all these things that say I’m dying such as having the Visiting Nurse Services provide palliative care in our home and trying to decide whether to get married or not. I want to be linked to Lucie for eternity. We love each other so much. But I’m very sad and depressed…
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…
Soul Love Forever 