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Chris Gulker, long established in Silicon Valley since the Los Angeles Herald Examiner folded, has been blogging about the progression of his rare, fast-growing glioma. "We have been overwhelmed since we went public with our current prognosis," he posted recently. That prognosis is not good, as he announced in a post called You know you’re probably going to have a bad day when… Excerpt:
...Your neuro-oncologist, after scanning your most recent MRI, puts her arms around you, and gives you a solemn hug, which was the case with me this past Wednesday....Anyway, the MRI reveals 3 new tumors that weren’t in my brain 12 weeks ago. In my understanding of Glioma, this represents a not-untypical course for the end stage of this almost invariably fatal disease. Prognosis at this point? A few months, at best.
How do I feel? In a weird sense, relieved. I’m calm, I’ve known this was coming for these last almost four wonderful years (thank you UCSF!), and I’m ready for this transition. I’m not particularly looking forward to the icky stuff – spreading paralysis et al., but I am hopeful that the hospice people we’ll be working with will help me get me through that as well as we can.
Shortly after we received the news Linda asked me if there was anything I wanted to do, and I honestly couldn’t think of a thing. We’ve filled these last precious years with travel, culinary adventures, extended stays in the French village of Ameugny where we now have friends and connections – we even launched a startup, InMenlo, that seems to be developing nicely.
Gulker says that writing about the stages, sharing it with others, has been helpful.