I'm back!

Well, I've been a bit of a slacker and I have no excuse! I've been home from the river for about two months now and I don't have a job and I don't have my house yet to be working on, so I have no excuse for not writing more. I'm up in Jackson this weekend with my mom and my friend Kristina and it's been snowing up here and we've been spending a lot of time in the condo and it's been a great relaxing weekend. Some trips are all about fun and adventure and this hasn't and it's been so great. We've gone on some sweet hikes in between the lounging and it's been great being up here seeing the Tetons and getting ready for winter.

I, however am not quite ready for winter. I feel like I'm betraying all my friends and years at Snowbird by saying that I want to stave off winter for just a little longer! I am loving the canyons! I've been climbing a lot and I've got a pass at Momentum and I'm stoked to be climbing there, but there's nothing like climbing outside. I've actually gone with this guy Tobias McPhee a couple times and he's been trying to make it as a photographer and we've gone a couple times and these are a couple that turned out pretty cool. They were taken on Goodrose up at Storm Mountain in Big Cottonwood. It's a route I've wanted to lead for like 15 years and I finally had a chance to do it and it was cool to have Toby there to shoot it. So, we need some more good weather!



So, as I'm just hanging up here, I've been determined to catch up a little. So rather than trying to do one huge entry I'll break it up a little, so keep reading! Hope you're all doing well and I'll be trying to catch up on your blogs as well! Enjoy!

New Home!!! .... well, maybe

AGHHH!! I'm sooo frustrated! So, last winter I looked around for houses forever but it turned out that I couldn't get approved for a loan so I wasn't able to get one then. So the middle of the summer, when I had cash burning a hole in my pocket I started planning all these great trips to exotic places around the world, and thinking of moving to places such as Steamboat, Boston or Montana. Then as I starting feeling the pangs of responsibility and my forth decade breathing down the neck and decided to start thinking about looking for a house again. This time I got pre-approved first then I started looking for houses. I was in a little bit of a rush to get it all going because the offer of the Obama-bucks. If I close before Nov. 30 then I get $8000! However, I look really bad on paper. Since most of the money that I make during the summer is in tips that I don't report, I needed to have my dad co-sign with me and it took us forever to get our stuff together. So we looked at a bunch of houses and I found one in exactly the area that I want. It's just a few blocks away from where I lives last winter. It's right across the street and down a few houses from Liberty Park. It's red brick and has a big tree in front and back.


I walked in and instantly loved it. It's totally a grandma house. Every inch is covered in terrible wallpaper and even the bathroom has bad carpet in it. But it has tons of potential. It's got two rooms on the main floor and a mother-in-law in the basement with just one room that I'm going to make bigger by moving a wall (that'll be no problem right? Just move a wall?). I have been sooo frustrated though, because I got a job but I don't start until Nov. 23. (which is good news by itself! IMC wouldn't take me back if I'm thinking about going back to the river, which who really knows what I'm going to do, but I didn't want to not tell them, so I'll be working at St. Mark's as a surg tech, which is what I was doing last year, and I'll be making more than I did and I'll miss IMC, but I'll be stoked to go to a new place and check it out.) I've been climbing a lot and enjoying having time off, but it's driving me crazy, because there's so much to be done on the house and I'm just WAITING for the loan to go through. My parents have forbidden me to buy anything for the house, which is a good idea, but I just wake up earlier than I would usually thinking of color options and flooring, and making lists of what I need to do for the house. But there's been some ish with the loan. During the summer when I was making money I looked good, but now when I don't have a job, and my dad hasn't been working much since his surgery (which you'll read about if you keep reading) so we don't look that great all of the sudden, and my mortgage guy has been working to try to find different options and I had to get a statement from St. Mark's stating how much I'll be making and working and hopefully I'll be able to just get the mortgage myself, but I am freaking out! I'm so sick of waiting! My closing date should be the 17th and I'm really hoping it'll all happen in the next couple of days! I want to get in there so bad! That being said, there's still like 10% of me that wouldn't be too devastated if I couldn't get it and I'll just forget all this responsibility and go to Thailand! But keep your fingers crossed!

Well, this will be a more serious blog than normal, and I've been meaning to write this for a while, but as with all my other blogs, it's been on the back burner. The bottom line is that my dad has (or more hopefully had) cancer. During the summer he noticed a lump on his neck right by where it meets his shoulder and he didn't think much of it. It got a little bigger and then he finally started realizing that it might not just be nothing. So he asked my cousin, Teresa who is a general surgeon to look at it and she was like "um... hello! You need to have this taken out like yesterday!" so he went in a few days later and she took it out and had thought it was just a fatty tumor but when she looked at it it was black and the pathology came back as melanoma. And the weird thing was that they still have never found the primary site. With all melanoma it starts on the surface with a weird mole or something, then goes internal, but they still haven't found a site that looks like the primary. Something else that is also a worry is that once it goes into the body it can get into the organs, usually first the lungs and the brain. But the good thing about my dad's is that a few days after his first surgery, they did all the scans and didn't find it anywhere else in his is body, which is great news. Especially since he was just about to come on the Grand Canyon with me. They said another week wasn't going to do any harm, so it was so great to have him be able to come and although I'm sure he thought about it a ton, as did I, but he was able to be in a beautiful place meeting new people and be in nature to think about it.
After the trip, he went had another surgery from a different doctor, Dr. Noyse who is a melanoma specialist. The plan was to put in some dye that would affect the cancer ridden lymph nodes that were all around where the tumor originally was. My dad had heard stories about the spinal accessory nerve being cut and he was really concerned about it, and he's played Squash with Dr. Noyse and expressed his concern to him. But the doctor spent 45 mins trying to get a lymph node off that was surrounding the nerve, but when he got down to it, the nerve didn't look very healthy either, so he had to cut that nerve and take out some of his Sternoclidomastoid (SCM) muscle. The nerve gives function to the trapezoid muscles, which shrugs your shoulders and raises your arm above your shoulders. He ended up taking 32 lymph nodes out and 23 of them were dyed and infected. They turned everything in to pathology and it turned out they all showed up looking not like melanoma but melanosis. Which apparently Dr. Noyse has never really seen before, but it's really good news. What they think it is is those lymph nodes and all the other effected cells did have melanoma but his body had started attacking it and the cells actually change so they're not metastasizing anymore and are not melanoma. So, that is really good news.

Now he's doing his best to not obey the guidelines he as a physical therapist would give someone else to take it easy. It's been a little bit of an issue trying to get used to not having that muscle. He can't do things over his head. Some of his other muscles will compensate for it, but as for serving in tennis or playing squash, he may have to learn how to do it left handed, bc he just doesn't have power overhead. Also cutting from the nerve being cut, it feels like it's always kinda burning I guess and he's hoping that will subside once it heals a little. He was able to go on a bike trip on the White Rim trail in Canyonlands that he had been planning with some friends. His plan was to drive the support vehicle, but he ended up riding almost the whole way. He was pretty sore after, but he was really happy to be able to do it.

So, now he's debating taking Interferon, which is a chemo type drug that with melanoma there's not that much proof that it actually makes that big of a difference in the long run. And he's trying to learn how to use his arm differently.

It's been a big wake up call for all of us. I'm pretty good at wearing sun screen during the summer but I have recommitted myself to that and to really checking out all my moles and staying on top of that. And it made us all realize how much we love him and each other, and how we always take advantage of having people we love around us. It made me so glad that my dad was able to come on the river with me and that I was able to have that time with him and that I still have more time with him. Hopefully they did get it all taken out and he is cancer free. Melanoma is a really hard thing to scan or test for so it'll be hard to detect, but he's also determined to stay on top of it and we'll get to have him around for quite a while longer! I love you dad!