How it started

Augustus 21, 2007

Dear reader,

My name is Nico Faaij. At July 20th 2007 I was diagnosed to have malignant cancer in the form of a primary brain tumor, a probably low grade glioom, astrocytoom, in my left partial brain half. That changed my, but specially also the life of the people near around me dramatically! The life of a 38 years old happy married man with two daughters in the age of 1 and 3 years and a lot of plans to seriously expand my career on my 40th.

Today my wife gives me a story from a partner in distress, neurosurgeon Samuel Hassenbusch. He exactly reflects my feelings, especially those of the couple last weeks. He wrote: “Life throws you curve balls all the time and you’re going to get a curve ball sooner or later. If I beat this, I’ll have really beaten the odds, but whether I life or die doesn’t matter if I can be part of something that might be a cure.”

Life has never been easy for me and my wife. We got nothing for free, but that have made us strong and growing faster then average in many ways. The refrain of the song of Billy Ocean “When the going gets tough, the tough get going…” has inspired me whole my life. We got already a lot of curve balls on our path and many times I thought we would lose the battle. But we always did what we could to give the curve ball a positive turn and that have made us life hard but also very interesting. I believe everyone get curve balls and it is the way you react on those that can make your life successful. Okay, maybe this problem will be too big for us to handle and I really will die between now and 5 till 10 years, as the doctors expect. But at least I will fight the battle against Brain Tumors till my death, in exactly the same spirit as Samuel Hassenbusch has quoted so nicely. Wait and see, is not something we like to do at this kind of serious matters.

I am very blessed that I have trapped my wife Klaske 16 years ago. She is by far the most interesting and supporting person I have ever met. I am very happy with her support and that she has raised the idea of creating a foundation especially for Primary Brain Tumor research and international information sharing. At least I will support her in that till death tears us apart. For more information please visit www.STOPhersentumoren.nl. At this moment it is still in dutch, but it's on the to-do list to get everything translated as soon as possible. If you have any comment or input for that website, please mail them on one of their email-addresses, as I know they will be appreciate that very much.

With kind regards,

Nico Faaij
The Netherlands
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