This past weekend was beautiful, as the majority of our weekends have truly been since we got here. On Saturday, all the boys went fishing with Papa at the end of the furthest pier in Avila. While they were busy drowning bait, I walked almost five miles— starting at the Bob Jones trail and continuing around the bay to meet them. Along the way, I serendipitously watched a mama otter with her baby on her tummy, laughed at a baby sea lion sunning itself on a baby sea lion-sized buoy, and witnessed a SpaceX rocket launch into space. And all before noon.
I spent some time practicing my mindfulness and reflecting. Some of you have probably been wondering, how did all this happen? Where did it start?
Back when James and I went to college here in SLO, he had terrible allergies. I remember my freshman year, I had terrible allergies. One time I sneezed about seventy times from my dorm room to the parking lot— an undocumented World Record I’m sure. So, needless to say, James was bracing himself for a serious case of hay fever.
Coincidentally, his voice started to get a little hoarse and scratchy a week or two after we moved in. How these two events coincided will likely remain one of life’s unsolved mysteries… He went to the doctor, he went to the allergist, his voice stayed scratchy. He had his good days and his less good days. His throat wasn’t sore. There was no pain. There was no lump. He assured me in his best Kindergarten Cop voice, “It’s notta toomah.”
Finally the local ENT took a look and found the source of his hoarse voice. She thought it was a papilloma caused by HPV and scheduled him for surgery. Apparently this is becoming shockingly common in young, healthy, non-smoking Caucasian men. But then it wasn’t. Instead it was a very rare cancer called mucosal melanoma. From the little I read, before my desperate self-preservation tactic of delegating this task to my dear friend Arlene, it doesn’t originate from the skin. They have not yet found a connection to sun exposure, or genetics, or environmental factors. As a young, health-conscious, non-smoking adult, this is understandably alarming, but so it goes.
In any case, we were right about one thing… there’s nothing he’s more allergic to than cancer!