Recovery mail 9 : … Now what?
Monday, May 8 2006
Dear Friends around the Globe,
Disaster has struck us, as I mailed you all right after Martijn died. It still feels totally unreal to me that my brother is not alive anymore – incomprehensible. Going through cancer-treatments, I already became very much aware how important your friends are for support. Once again, I’m getting much support from a lot of you. Thank you.
- Martijn
Martijn’s funeral ceremony was strikingly beautiful. So many of you were present, it was even hard to find an empty spot to stand in the back of the church and after the burial we were shacking hands of friends and family for way over two hours. Loads of emails and cards with lots of words or without any. It is comforting to feel so much sympathy and to see we were not the only ones shocked beyond belief. My mind is a big question-mark. Why? How can I not have seen this coming? Why didn’t he ask me for help? Did I fell short in love or support or anything else? Could I have helped prevent this?
Naturally these feelings dominate since, and I don’t know the best way to move forward. I stayed at home for some three weeks and then felt I needed some daily rhythm to hold onto and therefore went back to the laboratory (more on that later). I still have a hard time concentrating on scientific articles and stuff. I miss my brother.
Marga, Theo, Sanne and I left for 10 days of skiing in Italy – we definitely were in need of a break. There was grief, sadness and confusion, but also quite a lot of fun. It did us well. Sanne amazed us by learning how to ski within days, something perceived as important in this family 
. Quite an achievement as she had to deal with three instructors at every moment… My parents enjoyed taking a break so much, they actually just returned from their second ski-trip to Italy.
- Since last September…
Although it’s weird to mention in the same mail discussing my brother’s funeral ceremony, fortunately I can say my health is improving at an amazing pace since my last recovery-mail from September. Before last summer, it was too demanding for my body to engage in any sports. Now, however, it is just perfect. Doing sports some two, three times a week is really helping me rebuild my body and recover my strength. I play squash mostly with Died and play korfball in a team with lots of friends. We made it to champion in our low-level league, which we celebrated extensively (see weblog for pictures).
My body starts feeling better again, although the process of “resocializing”
is not easy.
- Cancer Research
As I wrote in my first recovery-mail, right before my diagnosis with cancer in Princeton I was looking for opportunities in the field of cancer research to do my next internship. I found this interesting laboratory of Prof. Rene Bernards at the Netherlands Cancer Institute / Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital in Amsterdam. Now that I was recovering I decided, after quite some thought, that this is an amazing opportunity for me to contribute a little to cancer research after recovering from my own cancer. What could be more inspiring and satisfying?
So after I followed my first course again at Leiden University from October (which I aced 
), I attended an intense course in Experimental Oncology at the NCI during the whole of November. This was not always very comfortable as scientists talk quite differently about patients and survival and even my own cytostatica were discussed. The lecturers probably weren’t aware that during my treatments, only hearing the name of any of my chemotherapy-agents was often already enough to make me throw up 
. Classes started at 9 am sharp in Amsterdam daily for 4 weeks – something I had not been accustomed to for at least one and a half years. I was very determined to attend every single class and have done so. Sanne was quite amazed I could keep it up and was proud of me (that felt good). A small victory.
So I talked to Prof. Rene Bernards and discussed opportunities for an internship with some of his group members. He accepted me and Jasper Mullenders is now supervising me – a 4th year graduate student who also graduated in Chemistry from Leiden university. He’s very personable, intelligent and hard working. I was only one week in the lab when Martijn died. Jasper worked with me and left it up to me to return to the lab and determine my own working hours after Martijn died. I’m very lucky with this grad student with social skills as direct supervisor.
- Sanne M.Sc.
Sanne graduated last December from the University of Amsterdam with a Master of Science degree in Econometrics! Sanne got lots of praise from Dr.
Tuinstra, who supervised her when she wrote her thesis on the influence of negative feelings among the electorate on election outcomes. She threw a huge party with her two roommates, who both graduated almost at the same time. The party was fan-tas-tic and held in a crowded house across the Ij in Amsterdam (great pics on my blog!). Can I get you anything, Master?
- Dutch Odyssey
I founded this company Dutch Odyssey on January 1 2006. The company sells the advertisement space on my websites. Maarten (programming), Died (mail management), Leung (design) and Clemens (accounting) all have helped me a little or more than a little with this endeavor. Time had come to do fun things you feel like, I thought, and in December I really felt like starting a small business.
- A full 120% Fertile!
More good news to end this email. Completely against my expectations, my doctors informed me I completely regained fertility! I was tested two weeks ago. They consider sperm-counts of over 20 million/ml to be normal, where mine is 59 million/ml. Motility is perfect at 59% of the cells, where everything above 40% is considered normal. And the movement ’speed’ of these motile cells is good as well. Wow, another sign my body is recovering well from the treatments…
More than enough content for one email. I hope you all are doing well.
Keep in touch!
Love, Rogier