February 27th, 2016

This post comes to you from Lincoln Nebraska, where I'm sitting on a porch swing enjoying the 70 degree weather. We left early on Wednesday the 24th and drove into eastern Indiana, where a snow storm prompted us to stop for the night. Luckily our hotel was a mile down the road from a Culver's so I got a butterburger, cheese curds, and a concrete mixer (for those who don't know, a delicious concoction of frozen custard with things like Reese's peanut butter cups mixed in for added fat content and a more delicious flavor). I love midwestern food.

Thursday we drove to Lincoln. I guess I should technically say I drove, because I love driving and don't let anyone else drive if I can help it. I'm really enjoying being on a road trip. It's interesting to see just how many more birds of prey there are once you're across the Mississippi River. As someone who pays attention to such things, It's a pretty noticeable difference. Driving in Iowa or Nebraska, you can't go five minutes without seeing an american kestrel, red-tailed hawk, or bald eagle. It's also impressive to experience just how much space exists out here. Every time I've been out west, the vastness of it all helps keep everything in perspective. It also stands in stark contrast to the cramped confines of New York City. The dog park we went to here in Lincoln was probably ten acres and felt more like a repurposed cow pasture than anything else. It could easily have been two or three different parks in NYC.

Friday night we met up with a handful of relatives--grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, etcetera. Korynne's recital was far more than just an excuse for us all to get together though. Seeing her play was a real treat, and her talents and abilities are genuinely impressive. Today we all made the most of the beautiful weather, and after trying in vain to tour the inexplicably closed Capitol Building (which I suspect inspired the architecture for Naboo [a planet in Star Wars]), we enjoyed a lovely day spent touring the University of Nebraska campus and relaxing at a couple of parks.

Tomorrow begins our tour of national parks in the Southwest, starting with Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, a park that will be new for both of us. We're really looking forward to it, and we both are so grateful for the chance we have to go on this vacation.

February 21st, 2016

My wife and I are heading off on a road trip Wednesday, so the normal schedule of Sunday evening blog posts will be thrown off a bit, though I do hope to still post often, if not regularly. I also suspect the next few weeks of blog posts will read more like a travel log than anything else, but since we're planning on going places like Carlsbad Caverns, Saguaro, Joshua Tree, Death Valley (I hear it's a wildflower year!), and other national parks, it should still be interesting, I hope.

Should the scans in a month or so find nothing of interest, this will just be the first of many road trips to national parks in the coming months and years. Should we get less-than satisfactory results, we'll both be immensely grateful for the chance to have spent a month driving to and camping at different amazing places in the southwestern U.S. Hopefully someday soon we'll get to plan for longer intervals than six short weeks at a time, but for now it's plenty, and we're going to make the most of every day we have.

February 14th, 2016

Last Thursday I had the long-awaited scans that we hoped would show I have No Evidence of Disease (NED). I'm completely comfortable with that kind of language. No Evidence of Disease is a much more realistic phrase than pretty much anything with the word "cured" in it. At best, all anyone will ever be able to conclusively say is that currently I show no signs of cancer. With tricky, aggressive cancers like DSRCT, you really never know for sure that it's gone forever. You can only know for sure that it is there. It's kinda like aliens. We'll only be able to prove they exist when we run into them, but the fact that we haven't found them yet just means we haven't looked in the right place at the right time. OK, not a perfect example, but you get the basic idea.

That's all fine with me. I understand that a declaration of NED wouldn't be a guarantee of health. It would mean that I'd be able to go 3 months between scans though, and that I could start living life three months at a time, and dare to plan for the future, at least a little bit. So you see why I was hoping for NED results from my scans. I also remembered well that it was entirely possible the results would definitively show that the cancer had returned. It's happened to too many people we've gotten to know this last year of treatment. So my wife and I hoped for the best, remembered the possibility of the worst, and really just didn't think about it much, choosing instead to enjoy the time we had, rather than agonize over upcoming results. We were prepared for a clear answer either way; NED, or new tumor activity. We weren't expecting another vague scan result, warranting another follow-up scan in 6 short weeks.

Previously, my scans showed mysterious fluid in my abdomen, which they drained, and two identical spots on my lungs, likely inflammation. Thursday's scan showed no fluid (yay!), and the spots on my lungs were gone (yay again!). But there is a new spot that looks the same as the old spots (meh?). Hopefully it's just a bit of inflammation. That's what the other two, which looked the same, were. But we'll see in six weeks. For now, we make do with what we have. It's half the time we were hoping for before the next potentially life-altering scans, but it'll do. We're amending our planned "Grand Road Trip of Pretty Much Every National Park in the U.S. and Canada," making it more realistic for our shortened schedule. That and the fact that we're doing it in March, when the Rockies are still buried in snow. After we travel, it's scan time again. Maybe that scan at the end of March will finally give us the results we're hoping for. Or maybe it'll be another vague result, or a definitively bleak one. We'll see. The point is that my life makes obvious what is true for us all; none of us knows the future, and we could die at any time. There's no point whining about it. The best any of us can really do is not squander the time we have, and appreciate every minute for what it's worth.

Housekeeping Notes

Just a few quick housekeeping notes here!

No blog post tomorrow, due to time and travel constraints

Note the new URL for this blog - http://cancerousauthor.blogspot.com/

I am no longer using the pseudonym S. D. Gloria for my writing. I thought it would be fun to continue in the tradition of using some form of "Soli Deo Gloria" as a pseudonym, but it has proven too confusing and made it difficult for me and others to spread the word about my blog and books. It will take some time for everything to reflect these changes, but within a week or two everything on facebook, amazon, twitter, and goodreads should be up and running again with "Morgan Bolt" as the author name.

That is all!