My last blog post was April 13. I have tried every day since to gracefully accept the measure of health I can wrestle from a disease process that is for now being held at bay…by a pill a day. Those pills cost my insurance company over $500 a day. The math nearly brings me to…
The surely epic bucket list item I won’t get the chance to check off today has finally lost enough pain for me to talk about it. Tonight I would have stood on hallowed concert ground in Morrison, CO with all four of our sons and Michael’s wife, Janice Rice Venable, one of my dearest childhood…
This post is a stream of consciousness update. Please excuse the lack of my usual attention to the conventions of acceptable language and grammar. I’m banging this one out. Dr. Pippas walked into our exam room this afternoon at about a quarter ’til 6 and we got down to business. I think today was our…
After my last Thursday meeting with Dr. Pippas, we’ve circled back around now and I’m on the full 800mg daily dose of Votrient. As I suspected, my quality of life has taken a noticeable hit. The superficial — and easiest to handle — change is that my eyebrows went stark-white within three weeks on Votrient….
The last time I spent the night in a hospital with a condition that was NOT cancer was back in the 1980s. I sustained an injury to the tendon that controls my left pinky finger. I was at Julene and Andy Buice’s home. Andy had a motorcycle accident several years ago and lost his life…
Sitting in the afterglow of a beautiful day. Headphones on listening to Evening Kitchen by Band of Horses. I can hear our sons Michael and Adam singing this like they did at our last family trip to Splendor Mountain. I’m scanning friends’ photos on facebook with the music in my ears. Families smiling, football games,…
Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 13, is a very big day for me. I know some of you have been waiting to hear the results of the lab work that I had done over two weeks ago after 90+ days on a vegan diet. Tomorrow is the day I’ll more clearly know about many things regarding my…
Since June 8, 2009 I have posted (man, have I posted!) on a Care Pages blog named MikeVenableUpdate. The blog has, to date, generated almost 300 pages of 12-point, single-spaced copy written by me, my Jill and the hundreds of people who followed my diagnosis, surgery, recovery and survival of stage 3, grade 3 clear…
Reprinted from the February 2010 issue of Valley Parent magazine: If someone had told me how difficult being a “stepfather” would be, I might have considered turning tail and running for the horizon. Please note that I put the word stepfather in quotes because it is a word we don’t use in our home. And,…