At this time last week I was sitting in camp with two of my friends, enjoying the evening after a day of mountain goat hunting. This evening Faith and I are back in the Greater Seattle Area, which surely must have at least three million folks around here. On Monday my friend Pat shot a gloriously large billy, with horns easily placing it into Boone and Crockett records, and he and friend Jim packed it back into camp in the high elevations of the Tongass National Forest. On Monday this week Faith and I will be talking with doctors and nurses about my treatments and I'll have an infusion of Avastin, in the heart of downtown Seattle. So goes my life these days, which seems to shift between the serenity of Alaska and my "normal" life, and the continued pressure of all the treatments and information required from my current medical processes. In many ways, having this contrast and being able to return to Alaska every time is the highest source of sanity for me.
Life is going very well for me, in general. I've very happily been able to stop using Bactrin, as my blood tests show good levels of the significant sections. Oddly enough, the two chemotherapies -- Temodar and Avastin -- seem to be causing me very little discomfort. Some of the other pharmaceuticals, like Bactrin and Lamotrigine, do cause me discomfort. As I continue to improve in health, I (hopefully) will be able to cut them back or stop altogether. At least it has worked with Bactrin so far. I'm also slowly getting adapted to doing all the medical things I have to do, which is a new experience in my life.
Summer has passed into Fall, and the short-term, emphatic acts of surgery and high-level treatments have passed into the long-term effort of Avastin every other Monday and Temodar five days out of every 28, until the middle of next summer. And we are adapting, and adjusting to the inevitable changes in our lifestyles. And, as good Alaskans, being just a hair stubborn to assure that our lifestyle doesn't change too much...!
Here's hoping your entry to Fall is going well for you too...
Dennis & Faith
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Amen to that, Dennis! A passion for those far places must never be sacrificed... tempered, maybe by exigencies, when absolutely necessary. The only bad thing about getting a moose this year was it meant getting the moose out of the heat and into a cooler, process that took up the remainder of the hunt and put an end to the campfire storytelling and strategizing for the next day's hunt. Killing a moose threw a monkey wrench into the whole moose hunt! Go figure. Pete
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