My father didn't feel well for a few weeks in February 2014 culminating in an Emergency Room visit where he was told that he had an unknown number of brain tumors and the best he could hope for was a year more of life on earth.

Enter the angels at Duke's Brain Tumor Center. Within days of his initial diagnosis, we had talked with multiple doctors and nurses at Duke, a PET Scan was done and a biopsy scheduled.  Not only were appointments made for my dad, but once the doctors found out that my mom was scheduled to have knee replacement surgery within days in a Pennsylvania hospital, they put us in touch with a Duke doctor who could do her surgery at nearly the same time it had been scheduled to be done in PA so that she and my dad could be together at my home in North Carolina.

My dad had the utmost faith in and respect for Dr. Desjardins and had such great appreciation for all that everyone in the Brain Tumor Center did for him on each and every visit. He was ready to fight this dreadful disease and they were fantastic at using that to his advantage. While at first he didn't fully appreciate going to physical therapy, within weeks he came to a point where his therapist had to tell him to stop exercising so much!

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, and we can now only wish that we had made him stay in NC to finish his fight. Even in his last weeks as his memory became less reliable, he would ask "What did Dr. D say?" While he may not have known, his family will always know what lengths Duke went to to make his final days as comfortable for him as possible.