I am surprised to see the last time I posted was more than a year ago, and interested to see that I assumed then that the story was complete.
Where are we at now? Well, Richard is I think doing wonderfully well. Here he is on May 29th, his 76th birthday.
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| Richard Sobol in City Park on his new red, birthday bike.
Richard is still bothered by phlegm and coughing stemming from his radiation treatments and does get tired, but he exercises every day, and eats more and more all the time. A year ago when I last posted, he still had his horrible stomach tube. Now he's just a regular guy. I think he looks great.
Late last summer, after the last post, a CT scan in Houston showed that the lymph node to which Richard's cancer had originally metastasized was growing again. Still no sign of the primary. In October, Richard's surgeon at M.D. Anderson, Amy Hessel, took out the lymph node. Periodic scans of different sorts since then show no cancer.
Meanwhile, Richard and I again took up our search for a new home in Sonoma County, California -- a search abandoned when a clinic in Occidental, CA, found the enlarged lymph node in September 2011. We went out to California in October, in December, and for the month of April. When we struck out each time, I was devastated.
We began planning to move to California now many years ago. We had tired of living part of the year in Maine and part in New Orleans. Having two houses was expensive in terms of our energy expended opening and closing houses and traveling back and forth, and of course obviously financially maintaining two houses cost a lot. We weren't really truly a part of either location, and were tired of being asked in May in New Orleans "when are you leaving," and of people in Maine asking us in late September "what are you still doing here?" We sold our wonderful house in Hancock, Maine, in the fall of 2010, and in 2011, began looking for a house in Sonoma County. We picked California in part because the climate is more moderate than either New England or New Orleans; in part because the politics of the State are better aligned with our own; and in part because want to be closer to Richard's daughter Joanna who lives in Los Angeles.
Early this month, as I sat sulking about our inability to agree on a place in Sonoma County, suddenly a very nice looking house, in the area we like, appeared on the internet. Yesterday, we concluded negotiations with the sellers, and we close at the end of July! Selling our house in New Orleans will take a while, and moving will probably be pretty awful, but we hope to be in residence in our new house early this fall.
The airport in Santa Rosa is a little more than an hour's flight from Los Angeles, and we are hoping to see much more of Joanna and her husband Ian and other family members, both in Sonoma County and in L.A.
We're going to take it slow and easy on the move. We'll have room for friends to visit.
Next time it occurs to me to blog, the date line will be Sebastopol, CA, instead of New Orleans.
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Before writing this, as I read over my old posts, I saw the photos of Richard and me with the Howell family in Houston. Gwen Howell, who was a good friend to me and who was a wonderful woman and such a wit, died last summer following her own long bout with cancer. She is missed.
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