Day 133, Year 11: To Concord, NH, and Back
Date: Thursday, March 3, 2016
Weather: Partly Sunny and Cold, High in the 30’s, Low Upper Teen’s F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
This afternoon we drove to Concord, New Hampshire (actually Bow, NH) to visit with Alan and Helaine Kanegsberg and attend the Concord Yacht Club dinner meeting at their home tonight. Alan and Helaine visited us on Windbird less than three weeks ago and at that time we had no idea we would back in New England so soon. But we are here and it was great to see good yacht club friends. We always laughed about Concord, a very land-locked New England town, having a yacht club. But there are lots of sailors that live in and around Concord and we have enjoyed the meetings for over twenty years. In addition to visiting with friends, Bob Lux made a presentation about the sail he and Beth made to Bermuda last summer and Alan talked about a book called “The Ship That Held Up Wall Street.” This is a book written about an eighteenth-century ship found as the result of an archaeological excavation at 175 Water Street in Lower Manhattan.
After the meeting, we drove back to Lowell. That was not in the plan, but just before we left to drive to Concord Mark got a call from Mass General telling him that his biopsy has been scheduled for 9 am in the morning. We were thrilled to get the call but we immediately realized that we didn’t want to drive from Concord to Boston in the morning. Being here just gets us an hour closer, but an hour in the early morning is a lot. We will still have to leave here by 7 am in order to fight the rush hour traffic, but that beats leaving Concord at 6 am. We also discovered another problem just before we left for our trip north. The heat in the condo had stopped working. The room temperature went from 70 to 65 over the period of the morning. My niece had told us that if we had ‘technical difficulties’ of any sort, we should contact Jared who lives next door. Mark knocked on his door and he was on the job immediately. We found multiple issues and Jared was going to work on them in our absence. When we got back tonight, he came right over and reported that he was not successful in getting the heat working but he’s hopeful he can get it fixed tomorrow. Thankfully the temperature has not gone down too many more degrees, so we’ll be fine tonight, especially since Jared brought over a space heater for us to use.
So in the early morning we head to Mass General for Mark’s biopsy. The purpose of the biopsy is to get new tissue for the tests that Novartis must run to see if Mark is eligible for the drug trial. We really thought it would be sometime next week before this procedure could be scheduled at Mass General Hospital, but once again MGH has proven to be extremely responsive to our needs. We are so grateful to have Mass General as our home medical base.
