It is with sadness that I post this message. pavid, or David had become a very close friend of mine since meeting him initially via these forums back in 2009. He joined the Giveawayoftheday steam group when Wizzard of Oz created the group and we started to play a few games online together (initially mainly Half Life 2 Deathmatch). This developed into a good friendship, that saw us talking via Skype face to face virtually every day for nearly 3 years, and until last summer we'd played online games virtually every night (usually games like Left 4 Dead 2 and other games of a similar ilk).
He discovered he had cancer of the thymus last summer. He'd not been feeling 100% for a few months so had seen his doctor. who sent him for various tests, that uncovered the problem. He was told that it was very slow growing and that he could expect to survive for at least 30 years. This news had made him laugh as he was approaching 60 and didn't expect to live to 90. Anyway, chemotherapy was recommended, so he decided to go for it; mainly because the cancer did cause him some discomfort; unfortunately the chemotherapy made him increasingly ill. His consultant had to remove him from the treatment before the full course had completed because of this. A few months later (around February this year it was discovered that the chemotherapy had unforseen effects. Basically it had damaged his heart.
Last time I spoke to him was several weeks ago. we'd arranged to play a game of Left 4 Dead as we'd not played regularily since he'd started chemo and we were looking to get back to playing regularily. That was the last time I saw David online.
After a few weeks both myself and a couple of other friends had become increasingly concerned, because in all the time I'd known David, he'd always come online to chat, even while he was undergoing chemo and he'd regularily played games.
I decided to contact the local hospitals in the area he lived (Paris Ontario) and also sent an email to the local police, but after two weeks had not received any replies from either. so I found an enquiries number for the Paris police department and phoned them about 3 weeks ago. they said they would send someone around to his home, but I never received a return call, so rang them again last week, again no reply from them, so I rang again this evening. They said that they had tried to contact me, but the number I'd given them didn't appear to work. (Basically they had not used the international code for ringing the UK from Canada).
Anyway, they checked back in their logs and found that an officer had visited Davids home and had been told by one of the neigbours that he had passed away a couple of weeks ago.
I'm still in shock to be honest. I hope the above doesn't come over as inappropriate. I just felt I needed to let the community know of Davids passing as he'd contributed a lot to these forums over the years.
I'll miss David immensly. We'd planned to meet face to face sometime soon and expected to continue with a life long friendship. He felt like a brother to me and we shared a lot of thoughts together. He'd mooted the idea of moving to the UK (He'd been born in the UK, but his parents had emigrated when he was a baby).
