May Update

Wow, I can't believe its May 5th. Five months since my last update, and I'm sure by now almost no one's checking this anymore, but its time for me to post an update. Life's been extremely busy. Hope's walking, running, beginning to talk, and basically being an all around toddler. We have our hands full with her, she's full speed ahead from when she wakes up until she crashes, once for nap, once for night night. It's a blast, and I wouldn't trade a minute of it.

I am still doing very well. My last test results came back negative for cancer and according to my doctor, I'm doing extremely well. Basically, that means back to as normal as normal is going to be. I do still have some short term memory issues that are a problem, but there's nothing we can do about it. Large parts of my life, memories of places and people, are missing, which is sometimes upsetting, but not all that terrible. I also still have alot of recall issues, like if you tell me something in the morning, its probably 50-50 if I can recall it at dinner time. It depends on how focused and clear my mind is when you tell me. So, I'm learning to carry around a little notebook, thank you Jeff Abbott for the suggestion, and make notes of important things in my daily life. It's a pain, but it's better than the alternative.

Honore is doing great. She's finally starting to recover from the emotional trauma of last summer and fall. I cannot imagine how hard this must have been on her, or any of my family. There are many times I think it must be harder to be the survivor's spouse and family than the survivor. Honore had to keep life going, keep going to work, raising Hope, paying bills, all while trying to keep me upbeat and positive in my recovery. And I know that once home, I was no walk in the park. The hospital was tough, but in many ways being home has been tougher.

And while I'm at it, those who supported me throughout this ordeal share in the credit for my survival. From posting notes, sending cards and emails, to bringing dinners by all fall and taking care of Hope on my bad days, I cannot begin to thank you all enough.

Honore has a patient who underwent a stem cell transplant a year ago next week. I saw him a couple of weeks ago, and consider myself lucky. He looks like one of the skeleton's from the original Pirates of the Caribbean. He's lost 35% of his body weight, still has no hair and according to his doctor's he's right on track with where he should be. I look at him and think, "Man, I really am blessed to have recovered so well."

I never lost much weight, in fact I went into the hospital at 215 and came out at 207. Thanks to diet and exercise, I'm down to 190, which is where I would prefer to be anyway. My hair returned shortly after the first of the year, although its very curly, soft as a baby and has much less grey. In chemotherapy, hair loss is common. However, what you get when it returns is anyone's guess. In my case, its thick and soft, which it didn't used to be, and has much more black and less grey(yay!). And as my dear friend Clay says, "Buddy, at least you've got some." He's been bald since I met him seven years ago.

I did have some very tough news from Dr. Grinblatt, my main oncologist, in February. He told me my odds of relapse in the first five years after the transplant are 50-50, and that they "go down from there." All during my transplant, I kept thinking this would buy me 15-20 years. It really kept me going, thinking the transplant was a silver bullet of sorts. So, it was a bittersweet pill to swallow to learn that no, relapse is a question of when not if, and when may be much sooner than any of us were expecting.

I guess this was a big reason I didn't post the last couple of months. Many people's reaction to something like this is rather instinctively to go to the positive, "It's gone, those are just statistics. Don't think about them." I heard it alot when I talked to people about the news. Only, its not that simple from my perspective. See, the only treatment left for my disease is a donor transplant. Now, I'm lucky because my brother is a perfect match, and should I relapse, he would be my donor. However, donor transplants are far more dangerous than what I went through. The procedure has a 25% mortality rate, and the patients are far sicker for a far longer period of time. And, they run the risk of developing graft-vs-host disease, which is extremely dangerous because the grafted cells are the invincible white blood cells. The patient has no defense other than doing another autologus transplant to return to their original immune system, if they saved enough cells to do so.

Further, making it tough for me to talk about, I know what a transplant is like, and I don't want to do another one. Period. I really don't want to go through that again. It's hell. So, I crawl into my day-to-day life and don't post because it allows me to just live today and not think about the larger implications of what's going on in my body. But I need to write more, because mentally and emotionally, the battle is still not over.

I hope this post finds whomever reads it well. Thank you for your love and support.

Travis

Happy New Year.....Restaging Update

Happy New Year! Thank GOD that one's over!!! Rarely have I been so glad to get out of a year and begin a new one, but this year I was over the moon about it. 2008 was a great year because we had Hope come into our lives, and it was a terrible year because my cancer returned and I had to go through this whole treatment program. I'm not glad to see 08 go because it was bad or good, rather I'm glad to see 08 go because I'm ready for things to calm down to some degree. The volatility in 08 was simply too high to be sustainable for any length of time. The highs were super high, and the lows super low, and getting from one to the other was alot like riding a roller coaster blindfolded. Seems fun at first, but I got tired of getting yanked around so much.

Christmas was magical this year. It means so much more with a little one in our lives, I cannot begin to describe how wonderful it is seeing her all excited and playing with all the bows and wrapping. She just loved every minute of it. Honore commented that last year, our Christmas morning lasted about 30 minutes and then we were like, "now what." This year, we had to stop Christmas morning for our morning nap, so we opened for an hour, then napped for two, then resumed for another hour afterwards. It made for a wonderfully long morning playing in our living room.

Friday and Saturday, I underwent my restaging tests. Friday was the PET scan and Saturday was the CT scan. They are relatively painless, and really don't take too long. In fact, the PET is really the worse of the two because of the way they strap you to the table for 45 minutes making it so you cannot move. I schedule the test early in the morning so its easier for me to meditate(because its almost like going back to sleep). Meditating is my key to calming my body, holding still and making the time go by quickly. I am on my way downtown to the Transplant Unit at Northwestern today to meet with Dr. HappyPants to get my update and see how the tests went. I have no reason to believe there was anything on the tests to be worried about, and am expecting a routine examination.

I"ll post more later today or tomorrow to update how things went with the good doctor. Have to get going.

Happy New Year again,

Travis

Merry Christmas

Every once in a while, something happens that stops me dead in my tracks. Today, when I got home from the last of my last minute shopping, and finished up my wrapping, I decided to lay down for a nap. I've been running pretty hard lately and can feel myself wearing out. However, before crawling into bed, I decided to check my email. And that's when it happened.

I received an email from someone I didn't know with the subject line, "fellow cancer survivor...." I won't disclose her name because I don't have permission to, but the email blew me away. She told me she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma at the end of the summer and underwent chemotherapy. In her November followup, she had already relapsed and is preparing to undergo an autologus stem cell transplant. She was looking up BEAM chemotherapy on the internet and ran across this blog.

After reading the blog, she wrote to say thank you for sharing as I went through the process and could I answer a few questions for her about the treatment. I responded with my best answers and told her she was in my prayers.

What blew me away was that, for just a moment, I realized that although my fight is over for the time being, for so many it continues regardless of the holiday season. Cancer doesn't care about Christmas or Haunnaka(I think that's spelled wrong, I apologize), it doesn't care about glad tidings or caroling in the snow. But the patients who face it do, and because of the cancer I would venture to say most are probably like me and know that the carolling, the good wishes, the glad tidings are more valuable gifts than any under any tree.

For that reminder, I will always be grateful for the fellow cancer survivor who reached out to me on the eve of her treatment to ask a few simple questions. She's got a great chance. She's young, strong and full of hope, and this Christmas, she's in at least my prayers as well.

So in the midst of all the pagentry and regalia that go on during this wonderful season of love and forgiveness, pause for a moment and see what the true value of the season is to you. To me, it's a simple, wonderful opportunity to share the preciousness of life with those who are closest to me, and to be grateful for the opportunity to be alive.

Best of luck to you Fellow Cancer Survivor, and Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy, Healthy New Year to all.

Much love,

Travis

Leukemia Cup Regatta Fantasy Sail

This past weekend, Honore and I attended the 2008 Leukemia Cup Regatta Fantasy Sail with Gary Jobson in Ft. Myers Beach, Fl. We had a BLAST! We got to race Colgate 26s(Which the Colgate Offshore Sailing School provided 10 of for us) in two sessions. A morning session of four races, and an afternoon session of three races.

Our crew raced in the afternoon session, and with me at the helm , we raced our way into 2nd place out of 9 boats. Gary Jobson came aboard and raced the final race with us, which was AWESOME. Talk about a truly amazing opportunity, to get to have a Hall of Fame Sailor come on board a 26' sailboat and race with us was unbelieveable.

It was great to see our friends from around the country. This was our fourth Fantasy Sail, and we have gotten to meet so many other sailor fundraisers from around the country it has been an amazing experience. What we have found is many of the same people return year after year, so it has become an annual reunion of sorts. (To qualify, one must simply raise $8,500 for the Leukemia Cup Regatta, its that easy.)

We also received information about the fundraising. This year, there were 38 LCRs around the country which combined to raise a record $3,675,000 for blood cancer research. The best part, to me anyway, is that 85% of that will directly fund research. The top fundraising chapter was Greater San Francisco Bay Yacht Club, which raised over $660,000. Incredible. My hats off to Ian Charles, Bill Nolan, Bill Elliott, and Kyle(I'm so sorry I can't remember his last name, but he's the incoming Commodore of the club). Anyway, Ian had a stem cell transplant in October and was scheduled to attend the Fantasy Sail, but fell ill on the Wednesday before and was unable to travel. They had the Maltese Falcon, the new $200M square rigged ship that is one of the largest private sailing ships in the world for their event, and from the sounds of it, it was incredible.

Houston chapter finished second this year and Chicago finished third. We did TERRIFIC. In a down year, we still managed to set a new record and raised $285,000. I am very proud of the committee, the LLS Staff and Columbia Yacht Club, as well as all of our sponsors and the other area clubs and participants who come together every August to make the event happen here in Chicago. It takes a year of effort, but it is one of the most rewarding things I participate in.

Yesterday, I had lunch with the outgoing Executive Director of the Illinois Chapter of the Society and the incoming event manager for the 2009 Leukemia Cup Regatta. I did commit to running the organizing committee one more time, although I made noise that this will be my last at chairperson. Having chaired the previous two years, I feel its becoming time for me to step aside and let someone else run it, however, due to so many unforeseen changes in the committee and the Society's leadership, I committed to one more year to maintain some continuity.

I'm exhausted. The sailing really took it out of me. It was great to go and have so much fun and see so many friends, but my strength is not what I had hoped it would be, so today's a major rest day for me. Then its time to dive into Christmas decorating and wrapping and playing with Hope, who's now 10 months and fascinated by all the lights.

Happy Holidays to you all. I'll write again soon.

Love,

Travis

PS - I do need to correct one thing from a previous post. Jeff Abbott has been nominated for three Edgar Allen Poe awards, but has yet to win one. He has however won the Agatha Christie, which is the best first mystery novel award. His latest is Collision and his next will be Trust Me out sometime this summer.

A wonderful gift.....

Last May, on the day I was due to get my PET scan results back(which is when I would definatively know if the cancer was back and I needed chemotherapy), a dear friend of mine, Jeff Abbott came to Chicago. Jeff's an accomplished mystery/thriller writer whom I have known for 12 or 15 years. He's written several National and International best sellers and has won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for mystery writing.

Since I moved to Chicago in 2000, I hadn't seen Jeff and we wrote/spoke infrequently. Then last spring, I got a note from him that he was going to be in Chicago scouting neighborhoods for his next novel and could we get together. I said that would be terrific and we arranged to go see the city on that day in May. We saddled Hope up in the truck with us, and toured all over Chicago. It was terrific to get to catch up with him and to see him at work in his craft.

Having never been around a writer, I had no idea how they worked or what went into writing a book. It was really cool to hear about how he could make the neighborhoods work in the book, when in reality they might be miles apart. It was also really interesting to hear what he thought of his characters and who he liked and disliked, it was almost as if they were real people. We had a terrific day.

After I left, I found out that the cancer had returned and I would be in chemotherapy and stem cell transplant land. I told him, and we have stayed in touch ever since, he's been a terrific support and, as always, has a good line to make me laugh. He's also been keeping track of my progress by reading the blog, and sharing it with his readers on his blog, www.jeffabbott.com/blog

He called me this morning to tell me he has dedicated his next book to me. Trust Me is due out in the US in July, and in a quirk of the publishing world that I cannot explain, in airports in Great Britain in February. Who knew....

Anyway, I am honored and priviledged to have Jeff as a friend and grateful for his generosity in dedicating the book to me. Thank you Jeff.

More later, gotta run. Life now feels like there's just not enough time in it.

Love to you all, Happy Holidays,

Travis