Time flies...
Nancy will finish radiation therapy next Friday and we leave that same day on a month long RV trip. WoooHoo! Have we ever been waiting for this! Can't wait to get on the road again!

Had a busy weekend. My old pal Jim Spencer was here for 4 days and Saturday we met old friends Pat & Dorkmai for lunch at Chili's. Then on Sunday our close friends Don & Dot from the Keys came by and we went all out to lunch at the Ocala Ale house. On Monday Jim & I had a boys day out with lunch at the Ocala Winghouse.

Sunday is our 44th wedding anniversary. Daughter Sheri will join us and probably go out for dinner.

Wow - I've been busy and didn't realize its been so long since I posted here.

Nancy has completed her chemo and it was very, very effective on the cancer. Then on July 15 she had a modified radical mastectomy to remove the right breast and associated lymph nodes, hopefully removing the last traces of cancer. just to be sure, she will have siz weeks of radiation and also continue to take the anti-cancer drug herceptin by infusion until the end of the year. Side effects of these are minimal compare to what has gone before and we are real upbeat about the future. Nancy is much more active now that the heavy duty chemo is over and can get out and do a few things, so stuff around the house, etc.

We are planning a 5 week RV vacation in October as a celebration. Will top it off with a gathering of many of our RV friends in late October, probaly near Charleston, SC.

Nancy had her check-up and second chemo treatment yesterday. Everything is going great - the doc says she is handling the chemo like a woman in her 30's rather than her 60's.

It's been awhile since I added to the blog - it's been a hectic month! Nancy went to the Moffitt Cancer Research Center Clinic and got a young oriental girl as her doctor, Dr Han. She is wonderful! And the Moffitt is a fantastic place for cancer treatment! They moved swiftly to get all the necessary scans and basic health tests done in less than a week and Nancy had her first chemo on 2/27. One of the things we love about the Moffitt staff is that they take time to make sure you know what they are doing and why and never make you feel rushed. Her doctor and chief nurse are readily accessible - we can call any tie and talk tot hem. We alos have a 24/7 contact number that will get us a oncologist at any time if something is not going right. They are also always cheery and polite and make sure you are comfortable as well as getting what is medically required.

Nancy seems to be handling the side effects of the cehmo quite well. She gets tired and has a bit of nausea now and then, but mostly she is able to keep up a normal lifestyle at home. The best news is that the chemo is visibly working - there is already a noticeable improvement. The redness on the breast has disappeared, the swelling has gone down, the pain has mostly receded and the tumor is no longer rapidly expanding. Might even be smaller!

This Friday (3/20) we go for the second chemo treatment. There will be 2-6 total, each three weeks apart. They will test periodically to see how much progress is being made. When the chemo is done there will be a recovery period to let her immune system reestablish itself, followed by a mastectomy and then possibly radiation or more chemo if needed to assure the cancer is 100% eradicated.

Nancy was referred to local oncologist (Ocala Oncology) of some repute but he did not exhibit any sense of urgency in her condition and could not even offer an initial consultation for three weeks. And the office staff refused her surgeon's inquiries about interim actions, e.g. tests or a PET scan, to expedite things. Nancy's tumor was grown at an alarming rate in just a few weeks.While we waited we learned a lot more about IBC and became concerned that the delay in starting chemo-therapy was serious and possibly even life threatening. Consultation with Nancy's GP and the Moffitt Cancer Research Center confirmed this, so yesterday we canceled the local appointment (wasn't until 2/19 anyway) and on Friday, 2/20, we will journey to Tampa and the Moffitt Center, where they seem to be very concerned about her condition and anxious to get her startedon the road to recovery. That will mean numerous two hour drives to Tampa, but now we feel Nancy will get top quality care in a timely manner.

The Moffitt is one of the top US cancer centers and probably the best in Florida.

Some sobering news late this afternoon. Two biopsies confirm that Nancy has Inflammatory Breast Cancer, a nasty and aggressive variety of cancer that readily attacks surrounding tissues. She will undergo 8-12 weeks of chemo and radiation treatments, followed by a mastectomy and whatever follows that. We are hopeful that it hasn't spread too far yet and that it can be beaten at this fairly early stage. Meanwhile, our travel plans for the spring and early summer are on hold.

We just returned from a fun 3 days at The Great Outdoor RV Community in Titusville, FL, affectionately known as TGO. We took our coach and visited friends Pat & Jim Dick (who live there) and our daughter Sheri and her boyfriend came as well. Ate, drank, laughed, toured the Kennedy Space Center and enjoyed a fine meal at Portafino's, a small Italian ristorante.

At the Space Center we rode the Space Shuttle Launch Expereince, a ride derived from the Shuttle Simulator. WOW! What a ride! It rumbled and roared through ignition and lift off, pressed us back in the seat at near 3 gravities, jettisioned the External Tank and cruised to the MECO (Main Engine Cut Off). What a hoot!

Repairs finally finished!

Hooray!! The repairs to the bathrooms are finally finished and we have running water again. Not to mention new floors throughout. I'm still working on one bath because we elected to remodel it a bit while it was all torn up, but it is still usable. I'm putting in a closet where we had a standard tub before -we don't need two full baths and we do need more storage space. I've built a partition across the old tub area and have purchased two nice wood & glass bi-fold doors for it. The closet inside walls have been finished and painted, the new doors are painted and the shelving purchased but I still have to hang the doors and paint the exterior of the partition wall. Hope to have it finished off in another couple days.

We are going through an upheaval at our stick house. A water line burst under the floor last October and soaked the subfloor and insulation for a couple days before anybody noticed (we were away in the coach). A strip of floor about 4 ft wide and 25 feet long was severely weakened (the subfloor was just particle board). Unfortunately that strip runs under two bathrooms, a closet and the utility closet where the water heater lives. Repairs are estimated at $8500[ so far] and now that the repair is underway we have no water in the house and no showers or toilets that are usable. Good thing we have a motorhome in the yard! And good insurance to cover the cost!

Launched our blog today. This will be a combination of our RV Travels and snippets of our life and times.

First, a photo of ourselves with our 2004 American Tradition motorhome. We travel in the coach 6-7 months per year and spend the rest of the time at our Florida home in the Ocala National Forest, about 15 miles east of Ocala, FL.