For the past few months I’ve been living off of a very stripped down version of my normal setup here on my trusty MacBook Pro. Occasionally I’ll dig through my backup image to get an Application, a file or some preferences. One thing that I had not transferred back was NetNewsWire, my RSS reader.

Among my normal feeds, like slashdot and gizmodo, was a feed to my cousin John Kauffman‘s blog. In an abstract way it kept me close family in Florida more than I had in the past and John’s sardonic sense of humor follows closely to my own.

I still haven’t transferred NetNewsWire back, but on a whim I checked it’s online version at NewsGator. Glancing through some of the posts I found some disturbing references. I quickly found the root of the issue:

A new reality

Apr 19th, 2007 by myself

Have you had one of those moments in your life when you felt you had rounded a corner, and you suspected you’d never see the other side again? I saw my doctor this week – Wednesday in fact – and she told me she thought I might have Leukemia.

“But my cholesterol is o.k., right?”

I was in to discuss the results of a routine blood test – part of my routine maintenance program. I had spent the better part of two weeks worrying about my cholesterol. I was sure it was going to be bad. It(the cholesterol) wasn’t.

My doctor spent five minutes talking about neutrophils, monocytes,red blood cells, and platelets. I was sitting there, stupidly thinking about my diet.

It just wasn’t real. It still isn’t real. Sure, I feel tired… but I don’t feel like I have Leukemia. At least, I don’t think I do.

Well fuck me.

Posted in Cancer | No Comments

Like he says, “Well fuck me.”

I haven’t read through all of the posts, but he has been continuously posting during all of this and is the hospital now. He is waiting on the okay to head back home and seems to be in mostly good spirits.

I wish I had known earlier. I will never stop checking RSS again…

technorati tags:cancer, kauffman, family

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