My Liver Cancer Blog

my first blog, a way for me to process my experience of being diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma

about

I am a professor at a Canadian university. I’m married, have close relationships with my family, love my 2 dogs, love travel, and enjoy hiking (but day hikes only – not really into the hut-to-hut thing). I really hope I can get through this and do some major hikes again in the future. Thank god I also love reading novels (literary prize winners, but also espionage, detective, and sometimes Sci-fi). And thank god I live in an era of excellent tv. And thank god I love writing. There are many things I can still do that I love, even having cancer and being more home-bound than I would like to be.

If you’re new, I recommend starting with How I Found Out.

What Was I Doing in Baku Anyway? (Not about cancer)

October 5, 2025

I’ve been meaning to write this post since July. In my very second post “How I found out,” I mentioned in the first sentence returning from Baku, Azerbaijan, and starting to experience gastritis symptoms shortly thereafter. It would be easy to read that sentence in a kind of breezy way — as if I come and go from Baku all the time. Which might make you think I’m an obnoxious person who casually mentions travelling to farflung locales as if it ain’t no big thing.

So I should explain. That was the first and only time I’ve been to Baku. And I was there because I was helping an animal rescue organization, GWARP ( https://gwarp.org ), fly two dogs to Canada for adoption. I have a friend from university who does a lot of volunteer work for GWARP, and after I made a donation to the organization, she asked me if I might be willing to fly to Baku to bring two dogs back. The dogs can’t fly unaccompanied — they have to be part of someone’s baggage. And GWARP was willing to pay part of my plane ticket and provide a place to stay outside of Baku — in fact a very lovely dacha outside of Baku, where they also provided meals. So, in part because I’m a dog lover, and probably mostly because of the adventure and when else will I ever have a chance to go to Baku, I said yes.

And it was a great adventure. The out-buildings of the dacha have largely been converted into a rescue location for almost a hundred dogs and cats, and so you step out the front door and are greeted by 30 small and medium dogs, and you step out the back (which I only did once, and only accompanied), and you are greeted by 20 or 30 very large dogs. For the most part these are not well trained dogs; rather, they are very enthusiastic, starving for love, touch, and attention dogs, who have been abused or abandoned and do not know their own strength.

I also was able to spend a day in Baku, walking around the old town and exploring a really beautiful museum, the Haydar Aliyev Center ( https://heydaraliyevcenter.az/#main ).

I only stayed a few days, and then I turned around and came home with two rescue dogs.