I’m a day late on this, but happy birthday to The New Life of Patient Dave – the blog I started in 2007, at Thanksgiving, eight weeks after the docs said “It looks like you’re gonna make it.”

Man, talk about Thanksgiving.

So I gave thanks.

• My first post, 11/29/2007, thanked my hospital: Thank you, Beth Israel Deaconess!
• My next, 12/4, thanked my surgeon. (Somehow I’d left him out of the first one.)
• On 12/9 I thanked my insurance company. (Yes, I thanked my insurance company – Harvard Pilgrim, at the time.)

And in between, I mused about two things that foreshadowed the future: a sense that I wanted to be more effective in life than I had been, and analyzing a misuse of statistics in reporting: [Read more…]

Last night a dear and inspiring friend breathed her last.

Monique Doyle Spencer, metastatic breast cancer patient, died at home as she wished. Please see the post today by our mutual friend, Paul Levy, who sponsored the publication of her book when no publisher would.

All knew the end was near. A couple of weeks ago she happily attended her daughter’s wedding; she had a good Thanksgiving, Paul says, then went rapidly downhill.

Monique’s book is The Courage Muscle: A  Chicken’s Guide to Living With Cancer. She says no publisher could imagine a funny book about living with cancer. Paul said he could – in 2004, long before the world at large could think that way. It was so out-of-the-ordinary that Business Week interviewed her, four years after her 2001 diagnosis and three years before my own book talked about laughing with cancer.

Many cancer patients have sought a better word to describe how they view themselves. Well, on Paul’s blog, Monique signed her comments “NASOV”: Neither A Survivor Or Victim.

Here’s the farewell comment I posted this morning on Paul’s post.
[Read more…]

This is a bittersweet but truly wonderful announcement. After a year-plus as my very-part-time assistant, Cheryl Paradiso has gotten a great full-time job! She starts Monday, November 28.

I really should have posted this in advance, but, well, I’ve been busy.

And that’s due in no small part to how Cheryl has helped implement the systems I now use today. I did most of the picking (because I’m picky), she didn’t know any of them, and she learned them all to the point of managing the business:
[Read more…]

This is going to be waaaay crazy and out-there, except my antennas are twitching that it might be reality within 18 months.

Don’t ask me where I got that date; my antennas told me. Serendipitously I read two articles tonight. (I love Thanksgiving weekend.) I’ve probably got the details wrong, but consider three technologies:

• Amazon’s new “Kindle Fire” tablet
• Amazon’s new “Silk” browser
• IBM’s Watson.

1. Kindle “Fire”

In case you missed it, there’s been enormous talk about Amazon’s latest Kindle product, the Fire. It bears little resemblance to previous “books only” Kindles – it’s a media-streaming tablet. To understand what a big difference this is, see the new Wired interview with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.

Note: all is not great – I’m a strong believer in David Pogue’s reviews at the New York Times, and he says this first version of Fire is ugly-bad: [Read more…]

For superb doctors: primary Danny Sands, oncologist David McDermott, urologist/surgeon Andrew Wagner, orthopedic surgeon Megan Anderson.

For superbly skilled and caring nurse practitioners and nurses, starting with Kendra Bradley (who “got me” as a patient instantly and knew my needs, due partly she says to her years in pediatric oncology), Gretchen nee-Chambers now-something, Virginia Seery, MeeYoung Lee…

For the power of patient communities, particularly my KIDNEY-ONC group (managed by Robin Martinez) on ACOR (founded by Gilles Frydman).

For Paul Levy, who was CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess when I was “doctor-shopping” in 2003. I’d known him in college a bit, and hadn’t seen him much since then. But when I asked if BIDMC had primary doctors, he said “You’ll probably like this guy,” and connected me to Dr. Sands. A direct hit.

And I’m thankful for the world-changing wisdom of thought-leading organizations like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, California Health Care Foundation, and Pew Research, especially the Pew Internet and American Life Project. (Actually Pew doesn’t lead thought, they just “count rocks,” socially, and report the facts. But that in itself is an innovation, in a world overloaded with opinion about what’s happening and what’s not.)

It thrills me, no end, that I’m alive to help advance the cause of better healthcare, both to aid the clinicians who did so much for me and to offer a lifeline to the many many patients who, every day, get news they didn’t want to hear. So much is at stake, and thank you – all – so very much for your work in this cause.

Blessings.