Randy Pausch...The Last Lecture

Diane Sawyer will focus on this man this Wednesday on Primetime. USAToday has a story on him today....http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-04-07-pausch_N.htm

Here is a link to a Good Morning America piece on him perhaps from last fall c/o You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8kUTUIveyA&feature=related

There is a dozen or more on his actual lecture on You Tube (see the side bar)...

Randy Pausch has Pancreatic Cancer. My Grand Mother died of Pancreatic Cancer 20 years ago this year. I kept a small journal about those 40 odd days from her diagnosis to her death and I found them recently.

I was surprised by a line I wrote about my having to deal with cancer within the next twenty years...I didn't write it about myself, I wrote that line as I saw myself as an adult child dealing with a parent who would have it, like my mother was dealing with her mother having it in 1988.

Funny how I ended up with it after all.

Randy Pausch has turned his "Last Lecture" into a book. The USAToday article quotes him as saying the book is for his kids. He also hasn't explained to his children that he is dying, only that he is sick and that a weed was growing inside of him and it needed to be cut out and chemicals used to make him better.

We told our oldest child something very similar.

I also wrote down my account of my bout with cancer for my kids. I have yet to edit it but I arrived at 25,000 words in getting the story onto paper. I'm not sure how much further it will go, there is more to add.

I entertained the "What if" I died thoughts early on in my treatment...especially when my Dr's were more nervous about my kidney cancer than my Hodgkin's. Even after surgery we were on pins and needles until Dr G (my Urologist) came back and told us the lymph nodes around my kidney were not affected...the chance of it spreading was always a possibility regardless of their guess that the cancer appeared to be burning itself out.

To be Randy and know he will not see his children grow up has to drive him insane. I know my speculation of that possibility left me in tears...

In the meantime Randy is living his life and leaving his mark for his children and for anyone struggling with cancer, anyone who has beaten cancer and with the odds today of getting cancer he is leaving his mark for everyone who will be diagnosed in the days, months and years to come.

I will buy Randy's book primarily because I may not have walked in his shoes exactly (because our Cancers are different) but because I walked a similar path... and because we have young children.

I understand where he is coming from.

Unfortunately so do too many other people...



This is the entire Lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo It runs 76 minutes.


Be well.