I was sent this yesterday via email and yes I wrote about Dr. Pausch awhile back, but I thought that the more exposure, or the more people that will see this “lecture”, the better off humanity will be because of it. It will only consume about 12 minutes of your time, but really, what is 12 minutes of your life when listening to a man who has but a few months to live?

Here also is an update on Randy’s current health:
April 2, 2008: Getting back into the fight

For those of you familiar with boxing, I would describe the weeks since my heart & kidney failure to be a “standing eight count.” I got knocked down pretty good and needed time to gather myself. Now I’m back on my feet; still a little wobbly, but ready to engage in the fight again.Yesterday’s CT and MRI scans showed that I’ve added a new, 11th tumor (small), and that a few of my original 10 tumors have grown, but only negligibly so. My biggest tumor is about 2.5cm in diameter. Given that I’ve been off chemo for six weeks, this was jumping-up-and-down good news, for two reasons:

1) It means the cancer has not grown like craxy, a big fear since stopping chemo.

2) Since all my tumors are in my liver, that means certain liver-specific treatments are possible.

I’m typing this from a recovery room; I just had a biopsy taken of my tumor tissue; that will be sent to TGEN in arizona, where they will run some tests to see if they can identify which chemotherapy drugs might be most effective on my particular tumors.

My next step will probably be embolization with theraspheres; a liver specific treatment that has a very low rate of side effects, and won’t make me feel crappy like systemic chemo does.

The fight is rejoined; I’ve got much more energy now — I hope to be back on the bike in a week or so.