Many things have happened since that grand mal seizure I had. There was more worry when my oncologist suggested surgery again, and relief the tumor board and epilepsy board disagreed and he backtracked. I don’t want to post about that today though. I would much rather talk about the amazing things that have come out of this process. This blog has been so full of worry and fear, but much of my experience has been incredibly positive and mind opening.

Going through this has made me reevaluate my life and make a lot of changes. The median life expectancy for people with grade II, slow growing brain tumors is 5-20 years, depending on the type of tumor. Having that possibility hanging over my head made me consider what I really wanted for myself. Life is not about planning after all, but about living. I decided that it was important to have more fun and honestly care less about work. We planned a lot of travel for our family and have more plans for next year. I went with my family to Oregon, California, and Mt. Rainier in the last two months of summer. I have also been wanting to move back to Spain for years, but it is difficult for Samuel to come because becoming a therapist in Spain requires a whole new licensing process. Because of this complication, I came up with the idea of spending the summer in Spain so that we can still do this together. If all goes well we will try it out next year. 

I’m also exploring ways to give back more to society. When I was in academia that was a major motivating factor for me in my life, but I lost sight of it when I started working in tech. I now feel like it is important though to help me feel that I am doing something for others. I would say that it makes my life meaningful, but that doesn’t sound quite right. It simply gives me something I was missing. To that end, I have started in some small ways to do something about it.

I created a website for people with cancer and dementia to outline a whole host of adjunct, alternative therapies that I learned about and to evaluate the research on them. It was mind blowing what I learned. There are many things you can do to improve outcomes. All of these are adjunct to medical treatment. They should not be followed on their own, but there give me hope for those who need it. For myself I started a ketogenic diet, which has been used to treat seizures for a century and has recently shown promise in treating cancer. I also started working on reducing inflammation and boosting my immune system in general. I finished the first iteration of my website recently (along with my blog).

Now I’m exploring ways that I can contribute beyond the website. I’m hoping to find a way to get access to some anonymized medical data and use my machine learning powers to help cancer patients. Let me know if you have any leads. It seems that I need an institutional affiliation for this, understandably. I very much want to have an impact, and data is my strength.