travel goes on the back burner......again

This would normally be the time that I would be listing the potential trips that we were considering for this summer. That, however, is not the case. It seems that a lot of things have happened over the winter that put a lot of things in jeapardy. In the fall, I got sick. I was diagnosed with c-diff. I had not had any antibiotics which makes it hard to contract. As I started to recover from this, other things got worse and I started to develop abdominal pain and began to lose weight. I had a bunch of tests and ended up in the hospital where they redid some of the tests I had over the last few days.

The doctors found a swolen area in my pancreas and could see that my bile duct was clogged up. They performed an ERCP on Christmas Day to open the bile duct and put a stent in it to keep it open. They sent me home and I came back in a couple of days for an Endoscopic Ultrasound. The results of all this was that they found a mass growing in my pancreas that they expected to be cancerous.

They sent me to the Lahey Clinic down in Burlington MA to see a surgeon who would perform surgery to remove the tumor. He spent a lot of time with us and drew lots of diagrams on the paper on the exam table and explained the benefits and risks of this surgery. They refer to this surgery as a whipple (sp?). The goal is to remove the gall bladder, a portion of the small intestine and 2/3 of the pancreas. As it turned out, they did all of the operation but the removal of the part of the pancreas. The tumor was wrapped around the blood vessels that run through the pancreas. These blood vessels cannot be removed or replaced so the operation was not successful.

Following a long recovery period for the surgery, we have now moved on to the next round of treatment. I will undergo an intense radiation treatment with 5 treatments over 2 weeks and then move on to chemotherapy for what looks like 6 months. Looks like Alaska will have to be put off once again. I will get back to Alaska...really.

I guess that my trips will be short and pretty much confined to Maine and New Hampshire. I will work on that as time goes on. I just wanted y'all to know what was going on with me. It was a long winter. I could do close to nothing during my recovery. I did manage to keep on with the turkey suppers but on a limited basis and watched a bunch of movies and read a bunch of books.

I hope I can work on the camper during this treatment even if it is at a reduced basis. I do have some repairs that need doing and I still don't have my firewood for next year delivered. that will need to be stacked when it arrives. I also have to restack what is left as the piles fell over during the winter.

Well, that is my story and unfortunately I am sticking to it. Hope y'all have a great spring. Clayton