A Personal Note From the Owner of BuildAHelpDesk.com
When Life Gives You a Stage Four Diagnosis, You Fight Back
If you have visited this site before, you know me as a guy who spent decades in IT infrastructure and help desk management, building systems, leading teams, and solving problems for Fortune 500 companies. That is still me. But over the last few years, I have been fighting the biggest project of my life, and I want to share it with you.
In 2021 I was diagnosed with cancer. On June 3, 2025, my 25th wedding anniversary, I learned it had progressed to stage four metastatic. I found out the way a lot of us find out news these days, through my patient portal on my phone. No phone call. No doctor in the room. Just words on a screen that changed everything.
The prognosis was not good. Months, they suggested.
I had other plans.
I combined standard treatment with an aggressive integrative approach built around immunotherapy, high dose IV vitamin C, a carnivore diet, faith, and the love of my family. I documented everything. I kept fighting. And I am still here.
I wrote a memoir about it. It is called Still Here: How Faith, Food, and Family Beat Stage Four Cancer, and it was released on Amazon on April 21, 2025. This past week it was featured on the front page of the Cottage Grove Journal, and I am proud to say the response has been overwhelming.
This site has always been about helping people navigate complex systems and build something that works. My cancer journey is really no different. You assess the situation, you build a plan, you execute with everything you have, and you refuse to quit when things get hard. Twenty years in IT project management taught me how to think that way, and I believe it helped save my life.
If you or someone you love is facing a cancer diagnosis right now, I want you to know there is hope. You do not have to accept the first answer you are given. There are options, there are strategies, and there are people who have walked this road ahead of you.
I am one of them, and I wrote the book on it.
You can follow my full journey, read about my treatment protocol, and find the memoir at WaynesCancerJourney.com. And if you want to read the feature story that started this week with a front page, you can find that here at the Cottage Grove Journal.
Thank you for being part of this community for all these years. I do not take a single day of it for granted.
Still here and grateful,
Wayne Schlicht, PMP, Founder, BuildAHelpDesk.com Author, Still Here: How Faith, Food, and Family Beat Stage Four Cancer
Read the full story and get the book: https://waynescancerjourney.com/home/ Cottage Grove Journal feature: https://www.cottagegrovejournal.news/stories/cg-resident-publishes-memoir,188920