I live in Punta Gorda, a beautiful little coastal village on the west coast of Florida, where I work as a financial advisor. I have been married to my kind-hearted and beautiful wife Yoko for 29 years. We have three lovely daughters. Our oldest is Paula, a 5th grade teacher living in Bakersfield California with her husband Brian.  My second daughter, June, lives in Honolulu, Hawaii. She works for the Kahala Hotel as the marketing/PR manager responsible for Japan. My youngest daughter, Jessica, is a junior in college attending Florida State University.

I will have lots to say about my family as my story unfolds. Suffice it to say I am very proud of my girls. I love them with all my heart. I can never say that enough.

Let me start this blog with a short biography. I’m a member of the boomer generation, born in Stamford, CT in 1955 and raised there until about the age of seven. I have a brother and three sisters, all of a similar age and upbringing. Everyone in my immediate family is alive and well, except my father, who passed away in 2002 from multiple causes. I really miss my Dad, but at least had him to turn to well into my married life. It makes me sad to think I might not be there for my daughters the way my Dad was there for me.

My brother Frank had prostate cancer in 2006, which they treated by removing the prostate. My father also had prostate cancer, but they treated his less radically with seed radiation. My 87 year old mother has had breast cancer, twice now, and is being successfully treated with radiation. Cancer in my family is a relatively new phenomenon. 

Our family left Stamford CT in 1962 and moved to Syracuse, New York where my father worked as a manufacturer’s representative.  In the summer of 1965 my father’s job took him to Pennsylvania, so we moved again. I have a few childhood memories of Stamford and only a few more of Syracuse.  I mostly remember Horsham, PA, which is where I say I am “from” when people ask.

Today my sister Linda lives near my Mom in Pennsylvania. My older sister, Jane, is an oncology nurse living in Virginia near Roanoke. My brother Frank works for a bank in Boston and my youngest sister Peggy – 10 years my junior – is a psychologist living in Houston with her young family.  Yoko’s only living family is her sister, Noriko, in Japan. Noriko and her husband Takao own a luxury car dealership in Tokyo.

My brother and sisters all have children and some step children. I have 12 nieces and nephews on my side of the family and two on my wife’s side, a total of 14 in all. Thankfully, everyone in the family today is healthy, including me.  I have been in remission for about 18 months now. I pray that I will live long enough to see all of my daughters married with children of their own.

My family is spread far and wide – from Tokyo to California to Boston, Florida and Texas.  When I was diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2007, I began writing a blog called “Fighting Lung Cancer – My Diary.”  Blogging was a way of keeping in touch and letting everyone knows my status. Writing has also been good therapy.  My blog developed a small following.  Eventually I decided to turn it into a newspaper column, called “Living with Cancer” which I continue to write for The Charlotte Sun, here in Florida. 

This blog for the National Lung Cancer Partnership is the newest iteration of my story, which I gladly share in order to give patients and care givers encouragement, hope and a better understanding of what comes next, after a diagnosis of lung cancer.

My wife, Yoko, now a naturalized US citizen, was born and raised in Japan. We met In Tokyo where I landed my first job after college. Yoko and I dated for nearly three years before we were married in May of 1981. We had our first child, Paula, in Japan in March of 1982. After Paula was born, we moved back to the US, where I enrolled in graduate school at Penn State while Yoko enrolled in English classes. (People always assume that Yoko taught me Japanese. In fact, I studied Japanese in high school and college and was fluent in Japanese well before Yoko learned to speak English. All of our children today are bilingual.)

I earned an MBA from Penn State in 1984 and was hired by the now defunct accounting firm, Arthur Andersen & Co to help sell audit and tax services to Japanese companies investing abroad. My career with Andersen lasted 10 years.  The first three years I worked as a marketing manager in Oakland, California. In 1986 I transferred to Tokyo and eventually became a national partner in Japan.  These were the heady days of booming Japanese stock and real estate markets. I was in the right place with the right skills at the right time. As we prospered we developed a taste for luxury living. The high life, unfortunately, ended all too soon.

The Japanese asset bubble burst in 1989. By 1994 Japan’s wave of foreign investment was coming to an end and with it, my career at Andersen and the life of a very well-paid expatriate executive.  The writing was on the wall, so I left Andersen in 1994 to venture into a disastrous career as a high-tech entrepreneur. We struggled just to maintain our lifestyle in Tokyo and quickly went through our savings.  By the summer of 1997 we were nearly out of money and, sadly, forced to close our struggling business and return to the States.

Yoko and the girls landed in Punta Gorda, where my parents were retired, in July of 1997. After an orderly winding down of our affairs in Tokyo, I followed the family to Florida in the spring of 1998, humbled and chastened. After six months of considering various options open to me and what would be best for my family, I settled on staying in Punta Gorda and trying to make a go of it as a financial advisor.

I have many hobbies and passions but very few talents with which to make a living. I use to love to ski and I became a decent skier, but I was far from ever being Olympic material. I liked it enough that at one point we invested in a townhouse in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Of course we sold that as my business in Japan went south.

I also loved horses and kept a thoroughbred in Tokyo for competitive riding — dressage and show-jumping.  But horses are expensive. Among the saddest days of my life was the day I gave my horse up because I could no longer afford her.

I haven’t been skiing or riding since leaving Japan.  Golf continues to be a passion and I am thankful for living in a golfing paradise.  When I am not working or playing golf, I’m pursuing other interests, such as volunteering in the community, reading history, writing, learning about art, and listening to music.  There is so much to do with life and so little time with which to do it.

These last 10 years have been challenging both professionally and personally.  I began my career as a financial advisor just prior to the crash of the internet bubble and the start of the worst decade of stock market returns since the great depression. I started the decade nearly broke. Yoko’s Dad died in April of 2001. That was followed by the horror of 9/11. Then my own father died in January of 2002.

Through most of these last 10 years we were living on borrowed money and pay check to pay check, trying to put our kids through college and pay the bills.

Yoko’s Mom, who never smoked a day in her life, lost her battle with lung cancer in August 2004. And while Yoko and I were in Japan to attend her funeral, our house in Florida was destroyed by Hurricane Charley.

Finally, in October, 2007, just as the sub-prime mortgage mess was developing and we were about to face the financial meltdown of 2008, I was diagnosed with Stage IIIA inoperable non-small cell lung cancer.

All the challenges I have faced in my life pale in comparison to a diagnosis of lung cancer.

What follows is our story of survival and renewed hope.