Introduction

After being in remission for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma for one year, my cancer has returned. On October 23rd, I will begin three rounds of salvage chemotherapy at Georgetown University Hospital before returning home to Chicago for an autologous stem cell transplant.

Unlike my previous round of treatment, during which I was able to function fairly normally and receive out-patient chemotherapy and radiation, this next round requires several hospital stays. Consequently, I have decided to devote some of the forced down-time to maintaining a blog so that family and friends can stay up-to-date on my progress, and so that I have a repository for some of my thoughts on the treatment and healing process.

I have to admit that I hesitated quite a bit on the blog title. My first instinct was to go with a pun on the word “stem” given the double meaning of the term: both because I was to receive a stem-cell transplant, and because I would be leaving Washington DC, where I have lived for over 6 years, to return to Chicago where I grew up (from whence I stemmed, if you will) for the transplant. There were some great ideas. Here's a small sampling:

-Where it all stems from (thank you, mom)
-How do you like stem apples (thank you, Julie)
-High Este(e)m (thank you, anonymous hipster on the 42 bus who overheard my phone conversation with Caren and decided to make a recommendation)

But in the end, besides not being able to come up with anything that met my high standards for wittiness, I decided that maybe the blog title shouldn’t be treatment focused at all. Because while its purpose is, in part, to update folks on how the stem-cell transplant is going, I hope that it will really be about much more than that. While I’m in the hospital, I hope that my focus will be on what I will do when I get out and who I will be when this is over, not the treatment itself. I want to be able to keep my focus on what is worth fighting for. And so I kept coming back to a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, which I first read as a high school student in Viktor Frankl's 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning: “He who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how.”

Frankl went on to say in his book, that "between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." I believed, when I first read these words a decade ago, as I do now, that this is the essence of overcoming any hardship, big or small.

So on the virtual pages of this blog, I will report on the stimuli, on my response, on my why and how, and on the journey that I will take in the coming months. Thank you for sharing it with me.