"Tudo Bem?" (= Everything ok?)

Today we got the news we really did not want to hear - turns out Wolf has stomach cancer. I do not have the details as to when the surgery will be - likely in a few days. He will be discharged from the hospital during that time and have to make some preparations. Today he wrote a post on paper which I am adding below, he wrote this before he knew he had cancer, I asked him if wanted to change anything after I told him - he said no, leave it.

From the Wolf:

"When you are in Brazil, this is the question you will hear more often than any other one.

“Tudo bem?” is, thus, what everybody asks me in the “Albert Einstein Hospital” of Sao Paulo, probably the best Latin American medical center I am privileged to have been interned on March 14^th due to an emergency.

Considering the unexpected circumstances that brought me into this hospital as I was en route to the sharks of South Africa, I am happy to say that, yes, relatively speaking: “Tudo bem!”

To suffer from massive internal bleeding while travelling is bad news, and in my case the tiger shark trip already started under a bad omen: the widely publicized killing of a tiger shark by this Craig Clasen, duly recorded by videographer Ryan McInnis and a still photographer. Reading about this despicable act of cowardice and brutality for the purpose of seeking easy fame and financial gain mad me sick – literally as I now know....

My gut feeling to denounce these two characters as outright liars did not mislead me. These fellows completely underestimated the general public’s reaction to their shameless deed: most viewers and readers were simply appalled by the senseless killing of an innocent creature. They were not gullible enough to buy Craig Clasen’s phony crap of a “moral obligation to save his friend’s life.”

Then, while being hooked on cables in the ICU of the hospital, I heard yesterday that NBC aired a controversial feature about sharks.

Apparently, and not at all surprisingly, that piece of cinematography must have been the type of sensationalistic garbage we know from Discovery’s Shark Week as it drew many negative responses from the views for its purported superficial and biased approach to the subject.

The media seems to need, and perpetuate, the image of the “villain of the oceans” as if reporters, cameramen, producers, script writers, and directors could not handle sharks the way they are: magnificent ancient creatures that deserve our deep respect and admiration, not our fear.

That news was bad in itself. However, what really enraged me was that it appears that friends of mine, all shark people, participated in, or facilitated, the making of this “documentary”. Should this be the case, it will not go unnoticed – just let me get well again, do some research, and if my friends were indeed involved in a movie that turned out to be bad for sharks, it wouldn’t be “Tudo bem” for them – the friends.... "

Wolfgang Leander

Sao Paulo