In memory of Rich Van Konynenburg.

[EndSFC]

Hi all,

Firstable I would like to give my condolence and best wishes to Rich's family. Please sorry my grammar mistakes.

I'm just shocked after knowing about his dead. All of us know death, and we know it is unavoidable. But when we know someone like him, some part of us hopes he is going to be with us forever. A magic soul like his cannot just go. And I don't think he has.

I hope what I am going to say reaches Rich someway, somehow, somewhere:

First time I knew of him I was 23, and bedridden 24/7. I had fallen sick 1.5 years ago. I barely could read English, but I made it to translate his paper from 2007. He had just unraveled the disease I suffered, Chronic fatigue Syndrome. My background on science was so limited by then, but in spite of it, it became obvious to me that his explanation about the pathogenesis of CFS was brilliant, and for the first time, what he wrote made sense to me, after reading so much silly things about the subject.

I started to expend the little energy I had to study every single day, until I got to know, after a few years, enough science to fully understand his work. Again, it was brilliant.
I asked him for professional advice several times, and we corresponded both publicly and privately many times over the last years. I was also lucky enough to skype with him once --I could not believe it. I was finally talking and seeing him!--.

He definitely saved my life. He diagnosed a cyanide poisoning I was suffering from taking cyanocobalamine. I think very few people on the earth would have been able to arrive to that conclusion... I was astonished and followed his advises (supported by my Doctor), and I did overcome that acute situation. Again, brilliant; and not only that, but incredibly kind and altruist of him. Needless to say that he treated me as "one of his kind": not just a patient, but as a person. Of course he was in a much higher level, but this is what a humble man does, right? Well, he was this way.

Then he helped me to move to the states to follow a treatment. I could not have done it without his help (and the help of other doctors and patients to whom I'll be always grateful from the bottom of my heart).

In someway, following Rich's advices, I got to find my current treatment, that so far has improved me from being bed-bound to be at about my 60% that allowed me to enrolle into the medical school last year.

Now, that I am 30 years old, I am studying the second year of medical school, and I am, more than ever, determined to become a Doctor, no matter what, in order to try to help people with these kind of neuro-inmmune diseases.

Rich, as scientific and as an exceptional person, not only gave me the strength and hopes to go on when life did not make any sense to me, but certainly guided my life and helped me to find a purpose, a goal, that I am going to pursue until we finally find out what's going on with these conditions.

In short, I can really say that the Rich's goal of helping us all, inundated and transformed me in such a way that now, I feel the same goal gives sense to my life.

I wish I would have told him this in life... Well, there're always things left to say, right? But I am quite sure he knew enough things to know to what degree he got to help people and touched our hearts.

There's one thing I would have liked him to see, and it is of course the whole explanation of our disease, a goal he pursued for more than 17 years (if I get it right). Well, for all of us, and for Rich, we have to continue fighting until we find the final clue. I will certainly do.

Rich, you saved my life and gave sense to it. For this, and for much more, THANK YOU. We will never forget you.

Sergio