David has been battling with cancer for quite a few years and decided to go public with it in a recent note to his mailing list. I was unaware of any of this and so asked for his and Susie's permission sharing it and was given that permission. There is a GoFundMe that has been set up to help them offset his inability to teach and play gigs and I encourage anyone with the means to support these two wonderful people. Just made a modest contribution on behalf of the Cafe. David has been an important figure in the mandolin world for quite a time and is a superb teacher who has touched a lot of lives.
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Hi folks,
A lot of you are familiar with my story, but for those of you who are not, here's a little recap. I have been diagnosed with cancer since October 2015. It has been in multiple locations since the beginning, and we have been treating it with a variety of approaches since that initial diagnosis: several surgeries, multiple rounds of radiation, and a couple of different rounds and types of chemotherapy. Most recently, over this past year I have participated in two different clinical studies at Mass General Hospital, both of which worked for a while but ultimately did not provide long-lasting improvements.
Throughout this six-year journey I have been able to maintain a very good quality of life, especially once I got past the first year of surgeries. For me, that has been defined by being active, and able to spend lots of good time with Susie and our girls Isa and Julianna, as well as being able to continue with my musical life of performances and teaching. I had the incredible good fortune to go teach the mandolin (twice!) at my friend Carlo's Accademia Mandolino in Italy. One trip involved meeting up with Susie and the girls to travel together around Italy and France for a couple of weeks, a truly memorable and meaningful experience. I have been able to keep up with live performances with Susie as well as with some of my other musical cohorts, even through these dark times of Covid.
I have been able to keep up with my private lesson teaching as well, which is extremely important to me. I have also been able to continue to be a part of a number of weekend and week-long music camps, which really provide an incredible experience of classes, casual concerts, and jam sessions. I consider myself a very fortunate fellow, and I feel incredibly lucky and blessed to have been able to share so much of this with my wife, musical partner, and true companion Susie.
However, the number of good options for treatment of my condition is getting fewer. The cancer is in a number of different spots, and right now I am having a pretty difficult time with my lungs. The disease has progressed to the point where I am going to have to stop performing and teaching, at least for a while, to fully focus on treatment and healing. I am starting a new chemotherapy treatment this coming week. It is definitely possible that it could help, but there's no guarantee, The success rate for this treatment is not as high as we would like it to be, but it is successful for some, so as Susie keeps saying, why not me?
We would like to ask for something we have asked for in the past and which has been so helpful. We would love you all to send all the love and healing energy you can to David, and to those caring for him. I (Susie) always say, "bless those drugs", by which I mean both bless the fact that they exist and have given help to David, and also, let us all BLESS the drugs and imbue them with our love and blessings so they can do their best for him. So this week as we embark on the next chapter, please send all the love, prayers, strength and encouragement you can to David, his team, his medications, and we Burke girls could use a little love, too. We are not out of tricks yet; nor is David's wonderful team at Wentworth Douglass, led by the wonderful doc we met at the start of this journey and who has been a friend throughout this process, Dr. Henry Sonneborn.
As we all know, David has been really remarkable through all of these last six years -- strong, good-natured, optimistic, a hard-working patient, and he has managed to keep his sense of humour through it all. It's hard to even think of all he has been through, I even forget some of it, because he has been such a trooper.
We are definitely blessed with love from those around us, and we thank you for all that love. We have felt it so often over these years, and we thank you for keeping it flowing.
We will write updates as this process continues; you can send us notes here or to our house at 16 Sewall Road, South Berwick ME 03908.
Love,
David and Susie
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