Six Important Points for me in my Personal Cancer Journey

1. To face my illness with bravery and self respect
2. To treat my illness with a detached sense of intellectual curiousity - and this means studying with care each and every blood test and to take notes in every doctor's appointment and to understand as fully as possible given my lack of medical education.
3. To turn my struggle into a positive  experience to help others on their journeys
4. To keep my eyes wide open and take whatever route possible to help me defeat the enemy within
5. Not to be a burden to others - and this means being a contributing member to my family, as much as possible given my strength, and liberating my wife, as much as possible from her burden of care.  This meant me changing my ostomy bag in the middle of the night, when I was deep in the grips of post operative surgical pain...and it meant me being responsible for giving my own injections and keeping notes and dates of medical appointments. Then when I became a vegetarian, I found recipes and cooked my own meals. All of this was important to me, for I became responsible for my own care..and not a victimized by it. Besides that nobody was going to  knock on my door and hand me a silver bullet.
6. And number 6 grew out of point 5. It seemed most important to me to be responsible for my own cancer research. That meant, for the most part sloughing off the banal comments of others and charting my own course and setting my own sails.  I absorbed everything I could to strengthen my own ability to fight the illness.I prowled my way through cancer websites, and whatever academic studies of cancer I could find.  That was what led me into Dr. Kahns office at the Medicor Alternative Cancer Care clinic in Toronto. Nobody pointed me in that direction, save for his website. But, I should add that also grew out of me writing to two universities asking if I could be put on a test team of patients in their cancer research.

I will add more to this list as I go along.