by Judy Handley | May 30, 2015 | Cape Cod, Sailing Logs Year 10 |
Day 232, Year 10: Success
Date: Saturday, May 30, 2015
Weather: Partly Sunny and VERY Windy, Temp in the Upper 60’s F
Location: Quissett Harbor, Falmouth, MA
We planned to do almost nothing today and that’s exactly what we did. I call that SUCCESS. Despite the sun, it was windy and cool out here on the water, so we spent the day inside the boat. Mark did a little prep work on a new bilge pump and I cleaned the bilge in preparation of the installment. But we’ll get to that on another day. We also waded through Mark’s medical paperwork and I got most of that organized. That prompted me to work on a calendar of events dealing with all of his cancer treatments. I talked to Heather this morning and she said it was hot in Falmouth. There can often be a 10 degree difference between places on the water like Woods Hole and Quissett Harbor and in town. In the winter it can be warmer near the water, but in the spring and early summer, it is always cooler. Maybe the wind and cooler temperature that kept us inside today is responsible for our ‘do nothing’ day. Whatever, it was a delightfully quiet day aboard Windbird.
Mark works at West Marine for the next two days, but then he has two days off to rest up. I have no grand plans for my time over the next couple of days, so I guess that means I have to get myself back into that storage unit and do a little more purging–not my favorite job.
by Judy Handley | May 29, 2015 | Cape Cod, Sailing Logs Year 10 |
Day 231, Year 10: Beautiful Day
Date: Friday, May 29, 2015
Weather: Sunny and Warm, Temp in the Mid-70’s F
Location: Quissett Harbor, Falmouth, MA
It was a beautiful day and it looks like tomorrow should be almost as nice. But then we have a chance of rain for a few days. I don’t like rainy days, but we really need the rain. So like it or not, I do hope we get more than a few sprinkles.
Mark’s scans from last week’s brain MRI and chest and abdomen CT scans were posted on Mass General’s Patient Gateway this morning. I thought we had to wait until tomorrow, but that is because I thought tomorrow was the 29th,, not today. Anyway, the brain MRI was clean—no problems there. So his little bout with disorientation a couple of weeks ago was probably just a low sugar problem as we suspected. But it was a beautiful thing to know that the episode was not caused by anything going awry in the brain. His CT scan was as the doctor here on the Cape described, but when we read through it tonight we were encouraged. The cancer is trying to creep back into the liver, but only in one spot and it is not as large as it was in October. We’re going to hope the lapse in treatment effectiveness was caused by going to the longer span between treatments and that sticking to the two-week schedule will get things back on track. Keeping track of Mark’s blood work and all of the scans is becoming overwhelming. So tomorrow morning we are going to gather all of the reports and put them in a notebook that will make it easier for us to compare one to the other. Mark has gone through three full years of cancer treatment and it is definitely long past time to get all of the paperwork organized. It doesn’t sound like a fun way to spend a beautiful morning, but we will at least gather all the paperwork so that I can then spend time in the evenings getting it organized. Mark would like to thank all of you who have sent him well wishes since we got the news that the cancer is back. Maybe if we all put our positive energy together, we can turn this thing around. At the same time, the treatment he is on is very new and no one is sure just how long it will be effective. We knew that from the beginning, but when the early results were so fantastic, it was hard to keep remembering that there were no promises that it would even work at all. The goal was to give Mark the opportunity to cruise this winter, and cruise we did. That was a wonderful gift of time and now we just have to wait and see if that can maybe happen again next winter. But right now, we can’t even think about sailing until the problem with Mark’s left shoulder is resolved. The results of that MRI show that he has a partially separated rotator cuff and that might mean surgery. Ugh. It is quite painful when he lies down to sleep and it is not getting any better. This happened when we first returned to South Carolina and Mark installed new gear-shift cables. That was on April 16–six weeks ago. Going through the regular channels here to get this diagnosis has been VERY slow. He still has no recommendation on what to do from his Primary Care physician. So yesterday Mark called an orthopedic doctor and made his own an appointment for next Tuesday. Hopefully he will at least get some direction on what he should and should not be doing. In the meantime, I am having to do all of the carrying and lifting—getting stuff from shore to the boat. The biggest problem has been starting the dinghy motor on the chilly mornings. I can pull and pull and pull and still never get the engine started. Then Mark has to pitch in and I know he shouldn’t be doing that. But if we are going to get to shore, he has to. Hopefully the mornings will warm up soon and it won’t be a problem any longer. In the meantime, we are researching the possibility of getting our motor adapted to an electric start.
Mark doesn’t work tomorrow and we are looking forward to a day of doing very little. Ha! I’ll bet that changes, but we’ll give it a try.
by Judy Handley | May 28, 2015 | Cape Cod, Sailing Logs Year 10 |
Day 230, Year 10: Back Home on Windbird
Date: Thursday, May 28, 2015
Weather: Partly Cloudy and Still Very Windy (SW), Temp in the Mid-60’s F
Location: Back Home on Windbird, Quissett Harbor, Falmouth, MA
Late this afternoon Jed returned from the conference he was attending in Norway, so we are back home on Windbird tonight. We really enjoyed our few days staying with Heather and the boys, but it is always good to get back home. Mark worked at West Marine today and I stayed at Heather’s doing laundry and processing garden ‘weeds’. Yesterday, while weeding in the garden, I amassed a huge bag of Lamb’s Quarters (the garden weeds I mentioned in a previous log).. I pulled them to make room for planting beans and squash, cut off the roots, and put them in a bag in the refrigerator. Today I cut them up, washed them, cooked some of them, and stored others back in the frig to be cooked later. It is a lot of work, but well worth it in terms of nutrition and taste.
Tomorrow is another work day for Mark. I’ll take him to work and head back to Heather and Jed’s to do a little more garden planting. After that I hope to have time to go to our storage unit and continue sorting through the boxes there. Mark doesn’t work on Saturday, so we are planning to do some maintenance jobs on Windbird. No big and exciting jobs on the horizon—just those run-of-the-mill, hard-to-make-yourself-do sort of jobs.
We are anxiously awaiting Saturday when we will have access to the results of Mark’s CT scan and MRI from Mass General. We are not expecting it to be different from what the doctor told him yesterday, but we’ll feel better about it once we can read the results and compare the findings to previous scans. Thanks so much to those of you sent messages of support in response to yesterday’s log. It means a lot to know that friends are there for you.
by Judy Handley | May 27, 2015 | Cape Cod, Sailing Logs Year 10 |
Day 229, Year 10: Emotional Roller Coaster
Date: Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Weather: Mostly Cloudy, Temp in the Low 70’s F, Windy
Location: At Home with Heather, Sam, Jonah, and Ollie, East Falmouth, MA
Mark had a cancer treatment today and the oncologist here on the Cape gave him the results of the CT scan that was done at Mass General last Friday. The report will not be available for Mark to read online until Saturday, but according to Dr. Avilez it appears that we are back where we were last October. The new treatment started then was so effective all winter that it came as a bit of shock see the reversal. We’ve known all along that this would happen eventually, but you are never really ready to hear it. Dealing with cancer is like being on an emotional roller coaster. The highs are high and the lows are low and we just seem to go from one to the other. According to Dr. Avilez, Mark’s oncologist here on the Cape, treatment will continue as is for now. We will know more once we can read the report and talk to Dr. Kwak at Mass General.
by Judy Handley | May 26, 2015 | Cape Cod, Sailing Logs Year 10 |
Day 228, Year 10: Field Trip and Tee-ball
Date: Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Weather: Partly Cloudy, Temp in the Mid-60’s F, Windy Evening
Location: At Home with Heather, Sam, Jonah, and Ollie, East Falmouth, MA
It was a busy day centered around grandkid activities. I walked Sam, Jonah, and Molly from next door to school this morning. Afterwards, Ollie and I drove Granddad to West Marine and then we were off to Coonemessett Farm for Ollie’s first-ever field trip. We enjoyed the morning on the farm with the chickens, alpacas, donkeys, and sheep. We got to see strawberries and blueberries in bloom and taste raw rhubarb. I’ve eaten it cooked all my life but had never tasted it raw—a bit on the sour side without added sugar. Ollie loved the chickens, but he would only feed one big rooster—his favorite farm animal from today. At the end of the morning we drove across the road to the home of one of the preschool teachers, Ms. Becky, for a picnic lunch. Then it was home for a nap for both of us! This evening we all went to Jonah’s Tee-ball game. The wind was blowing so hard that it made 60 degrees feel cold, so Granddad, Ollie, and I used that excuse to sneak out early to go home and get dinner on the table. Ollie didn’t sleep well last night and kept Heather up most of the night, so tonight Mark and I invited him to have a ‘sleep-over’ in our bed. We’ll have to see how that works out, but here’s hoping for a good night’s sleep for everyone.
by Judy Handley | May 25, 2015 | Cape Cod, Sailing Logs Year 10 |
Day 227, Year 10: Memorial Day
Date: Monday, May 25, 2015
Weather: Partly Sunny, Temp in the Lower 60’s F with Wind Settling a Bit
Location: At Home with Heather, Sam, Jonah, and Ollie, East Falmouth, MA
Memorial Day Parade . . . Trip to the Beach . . . Planting Corn and Washing Cars . . . Ending the Day with ‘Perfect Combo’ Dinner. This was our Memorial Day. Sam’s Scout Troop marched in the Memorial Day parade in downtown Falmouth this morning. The highlight of the program was listening to a bagpipe band playing Amazing Grace. It was amazing. After the parade we made a stop at West Marine to buy Sam a hat just like Granddad’s. We discovered this weekend that Sam wears the same size hat as Mark when Sam tried on his Tilley hat. He fell in love with it and did need a summer hat, thus today’s purchase. Then it was on the beach. The sky clouded over after the parade and we thought it would be just too cold at the beach, but we were wrong. The inner beach at Quissett is so protected that even without full sunshine, the temperature was fine. The boys enjoyed their beach time and we enjoyed watching the ‘show.’ On the way home we stopped to buy locally caught squid and clams to add to our ‘perfect combo’ dinner menu. Yesterday when I asked the kids what they would like to grill for Memorial Day dinner, they decided on ribs and personal pizzas. Sam declared those two items ‘the perfect combo’ and Heather, Mark, and I got a kick out of that. Only an 8 year-old would think ribs and pizza go together, but we went with it and added calamari and clams as appetizers and corn-on-the-cob and garden weeds to the main menu. Heather’s garden grows a huge crop of Lamb’s Quarters (Chenopodium album or berlandiari) each year and this is a weed we value highly. It is a relative of spinach and you cook it like you would kale or any other green. It really is super delicious and very nutritious. It is the second highest nutritional giant in the wild foods kingdom with Amaranth being number one. Mark and I ended the day by reading bedtime stories to the boys. We are staying here at Heather’s tonight to help get the boys off to school in the morning. Mark and I still have our colds but we are hanging in there.
