The time frame is October 2006. My mom had seen countless doctors about concerns she had with her body. The doctors always said nothing was wrong with her but we should do this test and that test. Basically I think they just wanted to extort money from her via various tests and scans. Finally, my mom flew back to the mother country of Argentina. There she showed her results to her physician. Right away he suspected cancer. After further review, that is what they found. They then performed the necessary surgical procedures and removed the cancer. This was thankfully done without the use of chemotherapy.

She then had a recovery period to deal with which would takes months. During that process, she did get a few infections and had some additional surgeries. Each surgery postponed her return date to The States. As of now, she has one last surgery to be done. Depending on the outcome, she may be able to return to The States within 30 days or as much as 90 days.

Obviously you can image the depression that can set in trying to deal with this ordeal. Not to mention the expense on the entire family. I have had to fly there a couple of times and my father, at least 3 to 4 times. It also makes it difficult for the rest of the family to see her. This is where Ustream comes into play.

Around the beginning of April, I was on Chris Pirillo’s web site and noticed he was testing out a new service he wanted to implement. Ustream.TV. I watched him during his initial broadcast which included the breaking news of the large earthquake that hit Acapulo, Mexico. He was there live, talking to techies in Mexico as events developed. Interviewing survivors. Coverage by Chris was instant and the national news didn’t pick it up until the morning. We stayed connected for hours and have been glued to his live feed (http://live.pirillo.com) ever since.

This made me realize that I can do something for my mom with this service. To keep her hopes up and maintain a positive attitude, I decided to put together a solution that would allow family members to all communicate together, in real time. The design was pretty easy. I sent a web cam to my kids in North Carolina for their Windows XP machine, I sent my spare Apple Mac Mini to my father in California along with an iSight camera. I then sent a web cam to my sister in California for her Windows computer. I setup my MacBook Pro with a Ustream account and had been playing with Ustream for a few weeks, creating a mashup site of various streaming feeds in the Chris Pirillo Community. That then gave me the idea of creating a mashup for the family to use. I own and operate an IT company (Cadco Systems, Inc.) so I setup a site on my web server and embedded all the Ustream feeds for each family member. This now gave my mom a single page where she could hear, see, and talk back to other family members via Ustream’s service. This made my mom very happy and should give her the push she needs to fight on. Thank you Chris Pirillo and thank you Ustream.TV for your help.

Tags: ustream, streaming, video, health, chris pirillo