Hi Steemit-community,
this is my first posting as well as my verification.
I just discovered this community yesterday and immediately saw that this could be a much-needed game-changer – so I decided to join for the ride.
It comes at a time in my life, where I'm starting all over … or at least, I'm pretending to be, not sure if this will really be a new beginning or just another one of the final chapters. In late 2012 I developed cancer, and one of the most deadly and nastiest kind, it seems. Now, about five years later, I've gone through – believe it or not – 38 sessions of chemotherapy (some of them of the very extreme kind), several heavy surgical operations, endless suffering and then, finally(?) six weeks of Proton-Therapy which is maybe the most futuristic cancer-therapy of them all.
What is left of me now is a different person, in a spoilt body. And the irony of it is: I've been an advocate of natural medicine for most of my life, I even published books on several alternative methods against cancer. But none of these methods worked in my own case. In the end, it was conventional medicine that "saved" me. And of course, it came at the exact price, that I had always foreseen. But what could I do? I had exhausted, quite literally, each and every non-destructive option to get rid of the cancer – until a point where my throat had grown so large that I was starting to suffocate. That's when I had to get a tracheostoma (a hole in my throat to breathe through) and a PEG (a tube to get food into my stomach) and all the rest. I was taken out of a full and happy life and thrown into a world of pain and constant visions of death approaching. Living through this nightmare and coming back (sort of) from the half-dead was the hardest work I've ever done in my life. Now I'm starting to pick up the pieces of my old life, but I feel like a Zombie. I had to hand over my businesses (I'm a publisher) to my wife and I lost most of my friends. I can't talk, I can't eat, and when I go for a walk it feels like I'm walking on the moon. Cancer could still kill me any day now, but a holy man, whom I went to see in India when it all started, foretold me that I would live through it until I'm 90 years of age. I still pretend that he's right, and now I've started to build my new life – what else could I do, except kill myself?
Having been an intellectual all my life, I luckily have a wide range of interests, and I've decided to make good use of them now. The Steemit-community might be a nice place for me to exercise my writing-skills and to tell you about the adventures my new life has to offer. Don't worry: I won't be writing endlessly about my illness – how depressing would that be! I might write a few pieces about it here and there, but mostly I want to concentrate on other topics, that fascinate me. Which could be: How to make (electronic) music, insights about life in general and maybe some revisionistic pieces about what's really going on these days (vulgo: conspiracy theories) and what it all means to me.
Welcome to my universe.