2010-08-01 — It’s been a long time

Dear All


It has been a very long time since I last sent one of these broadcast newsletters. Some of you are up to date with my news and others are not and I’m sorry for having been so disorganised over this.

I’m afraid the news is not all that good. I was delighted in January when I passed another one of the check-ups on my lungs. I was really starting to think that the chemo-therapy had really worked. The doctors were optimistic too and increased the interval between check-ups from three months to five months. I even taught a course at Webster University in the Fall.

In April and May I started having a lot of pain from my ribs. Checks were made and little found. I get hay fever in the Spring and that causes me to cough a lot and it seemed that this violent coughing had done some damage to the area of my ribs — this actually did happen some years back and so we all thought this was just a reoccurrence. But it turned out not to be the case.

My check up in June showed real problems. The cancer had reappeared in both my lungs and had also spread to my ribs on the left side (this explains the pain). So now I have a reoccurrence of the lung cancer and also bone cancer. This cannot be operated on so the doctors are doing another round of chemo-therapy.

My oncologist when I pressed him for an honest forecast said that things were by no means hopeless, but it looked likely that my cancer would never be actually cured but would rather be regularly kept at bay with treatment — presumably with chemo-therapy.

Anyway I am now undergoing chemo-therapy — I have had three sessions (each involves three days; that is two nights in hospital) and have another five sessions to go. The sessions happen every two weeks so this will go on until early October.

I had some bad after effects at first and was further ‘disabled’ by the horrendous hot weather we had in Vienna for a while, but now am handling things pretty well and am enjoying life once more — though it is a somewhat less active life than before at the moment.

Margaret (my ex-wife) has been having problems too. She had to have a long course of daily radiation therapy and it is still unclear whether this has worked or not. Her doctors seem to be a bit confused and this is very disturbing. However there has been no actual bad news and there is hope that the doctors will soon come up with an opinion — preferably an optimistic one.

Both Margaret and I have been so pleased that Sarah and her fiancé Ben moved to Vienna a year or so ago. It is so good that both are now settled happily in Vienna and that our family is re-united in one city.

I wish you all the best and am sorry that I have been irregular and inconsistent in keeping in touch with many of you.

David