First step is done
We’re home again. Friday afternoon after the PET test the doctor sent us home together with a Santa-size bag of medication. My friend Zhiben came up to Taipei and helped us out with the details. Very nice of him. This was my first step on the road to recovery. To summarize the week: the operation […]
my PET dream 2: “always together”
This was my second dream: I was back in Sweden again. My ashes were scattered on a hillside overlooking a lake. It must have been somewhere outside of Stockholm because there were oak trees in the forest, not only pine. This is a peaceful resting place, I thought. Not a bad location to hang out […]
my PET dream 1: a blessed life
Inside the PET machine I had two dreams. This was the first of them: I dreamed I saw a parade of people. Faces I’ve known from many different times and places were one after the other passing before me. There was my father carrying me through the Swedish forest on his back; my sisters wrapped […]
Yrsa and Rima
Our car was waiting at the highspeed-train station in Hsinchu. We hopped in and payed the exorbitant parking fee. It’s been a week after all. First we drove off to get something to eat and then we stopped by at NCTU to pick up mail. My colleagues, professors Lee and Tsai, came down to the […]
“elementary my dear Watson”
Yesterday, Thursday, there were no more tests planned. I and Diane spent most of the day in our room. I took off my hospital clothes and slept in my underwear. The way I do at home. Diane came into bed with me. NTU Hospital beds are narrow, but if you fold up the grid on […]
inside the PET
I spent two hours inside this machine today. This is a PET machine, a machine for Positron Emission Tomography. After two hours inside it, this machine knows more about you than you will ever know yourself. This is the machine that finds cancers however small and however inaccessible. Going in through the long tube in the […]
trying to keep our heads
Thanks for all the comments after our crisis last night. They are incredibly helpful. Your wisdom and knowledge of cancer make it possible for us to start thinking of different alternatives. We are trying, despite all odds, to stay positive. Thanks to you, this is how we are thinking about it now: those “spots” and […]
suddenly: new fears
Diane and my friend Tsungyi just had a discussion with the junior doctor who is in charge of me here on the ward. More data has come back and he isn’t happy with it. There is a “shadow” in one of my lungs and there is a “spot” on my liver. We don’t know what […]
“removed all growth tissue”; “fully recover”
The most important appointment yesterday was with professor Ko himself. I hadn’t seen him since the operation and it was about time he checked up on me. Before the check-up I was a wreck as always. What if he would tell me that the operation hadn’t gone as well as he had hoped? What if […]
and then the web pages crashed
Just to add extra drama, this web page crashed last night. In fact my whole server went down. Usually when that happens I can restart it by logging in through a back-door, but now this wasn’t even possible. Without a blog, there is no way to update you and no way to get feed-back. For […]