Last night, while settling into the twilight haze of opiates and other sleep-inducing medications, I let my mind wander back to the last few weeks before I took my sore throat to the doctor a few years ago, precipitating the massive mobilization of resources when it became clear that my “sore throat” was in fact a Stage 4 malignant tumor that had already spread from its origin on my tongue to the new lands of my salivary glands. About a month before that initial diagnosis, I started having a dull sort of ache in the back of my mouth. Unfortunately (in this instance) this was a familiar kind of pain. For my entire adult life, I was subject to odd infections in my gums and around the rear of my teeth, in the vicinity of, but unrelated to, my “wisdom teeth”, which, as Cathy has pointed out, were yanked in preparation for my first round of radiation therapy.
At times, the persistent mouth infections had a comic aspect. When I did the oral comprehensive exam for my master’s degree, I had to keep a bottle of Listerine (the brownish stuff thick with eucalyptol, not a sweet “breath freshener”) on the desk and beg frequent bathroom breaks to swish the accumulated microbial mess out of my mouth. The committee assured me they gave me no extra credit for such a bald-faced attempt to garner sympathy. Although, in retrospect, I suspect they did.
Actually, the comedic nature of that incident stretched out for quite a while longer, and narrowly missed appending a tragedy to its etiolated life span. As was the academic custom at the time, we planned a major party that evening (the fact that it was a school night, a Tuesday I believe, be damned) to celebrate (presumptively) my passing the examinations, or, conversely, to provide an emotional buffer in the event of failure.
Of course, I passed. I say “of course”, but I had an unconventional boost from more than my oral hygiene. When we convened for the exam, one of my committee members was missing. My major professor, the much esteemed Dr. W, called the MIA faculty member’s office a couple of times as we got underway. Dr. D’s phone line was busy. After a few attempts, we gave up on Dr. D and completed my exam. When I walked across campus heading for the state-of-the-art party facility, Dr. D burst out of his building, shouting questions at me as he ran. I gave him the formal definition of salinity which, at the time, was 1.8065 times the chlorinity (I believe it is defined differently today). At that point, Dr. W showed up to distract Dr. D, taking him back to discuss the exam with the rest of the committee. I continued to the SOTA party facility.
Where there were, per usual, a keg of beer and buckets of steamed crabs. Later in the evening, I discovered an unopened bottle of Sloe Gin, a sweet, highly alcoholic cordial based on the flavor of the “sloe”, a small species of European plum (once when I was hiking around the borderlands between Belgium and the Netherlands in the vicinity of Maastricht, I stumbled upon a hedgerow hanging thick with ripe, sweet sloes. Needless to say I stuffed my face, and was refreshed to finish my hike back to the very nice boutique hotel with the outstanding restaurant). Of course I cracked the bottle of Sloe Gin and swigged some. Then swigged some more. Much later, I had consumed most of the half-liter bottle. By then the discomfort of my infected mouth was accompanied by a disgusting build up of syrupy, sugary goop in my throat from the cordial. To cut the latter, I started drinking the Listerine. Which is not a safe, sane thing to do. Fortunately, I ran out of Sloe Gin before I could consume enough of the Listerine to do any real damage.
Anyway. Back to that month prior to my cancer diagnosis. During that period, I purchased and swished my mouth with gallons and gallons of Listerine. Took handfuls of over-the-counter pain killers. Finally, I met an old and dear friend for dinner. I was helping esteemed Ms. W celebrate her own triumph over breast cancer. Between funny stories and reminiscences, Ms. W convinced me to take my month-long mouth pain to my doctor (Cathy, of course, had been bugging me to get my butt to the doctor for weeks). Kicking off, the following Thursday, my cancer wars that are now entering their fifth year.
Anyway, as I mentioned last week, I’ve recently started to bleed a lot more frequently and intensely than I have been. My damaged, rebuilt, re-damaged, and re-rebuilt oral cavity and throat started to run with thick clots of fresh, red blood. And pain, which has generally been under control, returned. So we saw a doctor last week, one of the head and neck cancer experts at Greater Baltimore Medical Center who have saved my life twice (so far).
Characteristically, he squeezed me in for a late afternoon appointment on an already full day, and one on which most of his staff and nursing support was MIA by the time I arrived. Not a bit disturbed, the Doc was his own assistant, suctioning away blood and mucous while manipulating the endoscope to peer into my bronchi and along my throat. There was nothing obviously associated with bleeding. Big chunks of my thoracic infrastructure remain, and will forever be, comprehensively trashed by the two rounds of radiation treatment. But otherwise, there were no sores, no visible masses, no inflammation, no cuts, scabs or scars.
Absent the naked facts of the blood and pain, this would all be good news. But, lacking something visible to blame for the bleeding, his conclusion was ice-cold and scorching at the same time. The blood is coming from a recurrent tumor somewhere deeper in my plumbing. He’s apologetic that there’s nothing he can give me for the bleeding. He did the rough-and-ready check for anemia by observing my fingernail color. Says “ahh, your anemia isn’t all that bad”. I had not even considered the potential for my bleeding to be sufficient to cause overt anemia. But apparently it is.
Dr. S, a Walter Reed Army Medical Center alum, immediately starts the diagnostic process that will ascertain whether I’ve got something trivial, something terminal, or something at one of the many stops in between. Next week, in lieu of the long-scheduled and cherished trip to the Outer Banks to photograph cottonmouths and roust out a rattlesnake, I’ll be heading to the lab for a PET/CT scan to reveal where and what this presumptive tumor is.
Dr. S was careful to prepare us for the likelihood that a third major malignancy in my throat is likely to be difficult or impossible to treat comprehensively. He repeatedly used the phrase “palliative response”, meaning, of course, that we can treat the symptoms but not the underlying disease. When I pressed him, he did say that “we can surgically remove pretty much anything”. Then he suggested that if they were in my throat cutting anyway, they might as well remove my now-useless voicebox. Dr. S says if they do, I’ll be able to pour liquids directly into my gut. Man, I would love to ditch this peg-through-the-stomach wall in favor of thick shakes dumped down my throat. If this new tumor proves to be recalcitrant or even terminal, at least I’d have a major bump in my quality-of-life for whatever time I have left.
But we don’t need to go there yet. Tuesday I’ll have the PET/CT scan. Dr. H will have the radiologist’s report that afternoon, we’ll have Dr. H’s interpretation on Wednesday. Unless the PET/CT output is unusually clear, the likely next step is a lights-out scoping and biopsy. From there, if they think they can cut to some purpose or believe I could take more radiation treatment, I’ll probably have to battle claustrophobia in the MRI tube. It seems, though, that they may use more approximate treatment planning this time. We’re running out of methods to fight malignancies, although apparently there are some chemotherapeutics that could at least reduce tumor size, and as I say surgery and radiation remain at least theoretically on the table. So, we’ll just have to let this play out, while I continue to mop up liters of blood and phlegm here in my Recovery Recliner.
This week’s entry is pretty much a complete downer. To offset at least some of the bummerly nature of things, I leave you with some midsummer photos. Remember, my friends, my pain can be your gain. Live ‘em while you got ‘em. Because you can see, from my example, that they ain’t forever. Rock on, everybody!!!
Been a bizarre, and none-too-appetizing, week here in the biosphere. Iraq exploded at the seams just like everyone on earth except George W. Bush expected it to (I make the basic assumption that Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and the rest of their coven knew PRECISELY how things would play out. And that they consider the blood-drenched boost to the military-industrial complex an enormous success. You can actually see this effect in Cheney’s eyes when he’s lying to television interviewers. He’s happy to respond to whatever questions are thrown at him because they completely and entirely miss the point. Which is that the neoconservative cabal was able, in just a few years, to re-tool huge chunks of global economic and social systems such that eternal hostilities beget huge chunks of cash for them and their cohorts). Syria imploded, enabling the explosion in Iraq. Iran is now “the” power in the Middle East. Russia continues to harvest bits and pieces of the nations along its southern border. China continues to harvest bits and pieces of whatever islands and oceans it can reach with a couple of Boston Whalers with an old-model fish finder and an extra gas tank. Etc.
At some point here, I might have to devote some of my copious free time to developing one of those models that you hear about in the news periodically where academics and/or consultants cherry-pick a bizarre suite of input data, crank it through a proprietary (i.e., “you wanna know how this works? Ante up the cash, my friend. Oh, and while you’re counting those bills, sign this confidentiality/noncompete agreement that means you can’t reveal to your clients, some of whom might be key decision makers deciding matters of global public health, war and peace, safety, investment, famine, likely appearance of dense clouds of locusts and other quasi-Biblical plagues, etc., how and why you’re advising them as you are”) black box, and harvest the resulting spit forecasting future political instability, sustainability, or monetary behavior (for one of a zillion examples, see [1]).
Among the many problems inherent in such models is the complete lack of any appropriate control or reference tools by which the actual utility of the proprietary black box can be judged. In other words, let’s say you’re CEO of a major global energy conglomerate—Royal Dutch Shell, say, or maybe Exxon Mobil. You’re contemplating major investments in East Durka-Durkastan, a notoriously difficult region where tourist’s kidneys are regularly harvested by local warlords to finance opium-poppy industrial farms that finance in turn the Royal Durka-Durka Family’s lifestyle, domestic police force, private jet fleet, and bail-out properties in Kensington, South Beach, and the Upper West Side. Back in the cube farm at your headquarters in Amsterdam or Houston you’ve got an alcoholic, unsanitary, and unsavory long-time employee who spends his days web-surfing and slurping vodka-laced diet sodas instead of doing any actual work. But every time you ask the guy what things will be like in 10 years in Myanmar, or Uzbekistan, or Durka-Durkastan, he jumps to the white board and gives you a detailed lecture on who is doing what when and why in those countries, and turns out to be spot-on correct every single damn time. If you are hiring, at great expense, the academic black-box people, you should, in theory, be purchasing more certainty in forecasting than you can get any time by wandering back to the cube farm with a paper bag holding an unopened bottle of Stoli. But there’s no real way to make the comparison. So you risk your employee’s internal organs only after paying the black-box people big dollars—and getting a Power Point presentation that, remarkably, looks exactly like your Stoli guy’s white board work.
Anyway. I’m not really sure how I got to wandering down the path represented by the above paragraphs. Or why I dragged you along with me. However, I can say this. It’s been a bizarre, and none-too-appetizing week here in Cancer Land (copyright, trademark).
One day I woke up to find my face and neck splotched in blood. This was somewhat frightening, although the doctors have repeatedly warned me that my throat is basically wrecked and will be inflamed and bloody for the rest of my life. But the copious fresh blood pouring from my tracheostomy tubing and throat was orders-of-magnitude over and above what seemed acceptable. Still, given the docs’ insistence that I will bleed sort of forever, I didn’t panic. Instead, I opened up a brand new fresh set of tracheostomy hardware and installed it. Within hours the massive blood-letting started to recede. By the next day, I was back to “normal” levels of gore, with pink-tinged phlegm and occasional expulsion of clotted red slime (I hope I’m not making you too uncomfortable here. I think it’s important that anyone reading this blog who might in the future have to deal with savage cancers like mine have some basis for anticipating outcomes). I have no idea why pulling the old PVC tubing (for that is what the tracheostomy hardware is) fixed the problem. But I’m a degreed empiricist, for crap’s sake. So I simply took the result as reality lacking a theoretical foundation.
Disturbingly, a few days later, the bleeding returned. The trach hardware is expensive, and I wanted to start exploring what the hell is happening in my throat when I’m bleeding like an Easter lamb slaughtered with a lockblade across the neck. So this time I yanked the tracheostomy tubing and washed it thoroughly. When I pulled it, it wasn’t particularly bad looking. No mass of microbial slime, no obvious source of pathology, no sharp edges. It cleaned up nicely. And, when it was re-inserted, the heavy bleeding wound down, back to “normal” in 8 or 10 hours.
So I have absolutely no smegging idea what the deal is with my sanguinary health.
But that was not the end of the quirky new discomforts I had to deal with. Early one morning I woke up having the first asthma attack I have had in more than 20 years! Leading me to ask this question: what the bloody frickin’ hell?!?!
I suspect the asthma attack was weather-related (hmm…global warming as a respiratory health disaster?). We had a couple days of warm, dry air. Similar weather around this time of year when I was a teenager would kickstart pollen dispersal which in turn would kickstart my bronchial inflammation. Today turned out to be cool, humid, and drizzly, the kind of weather that can clear the air of its heavy pollen burden. And today my breathing is fine. But the return of my pulmonary nemesis after all this time is disturbing. I’m already having a cascade of nasty memories of desperate, claustrophobic struggles to breathe.
Tonight, I don’t feel particularly bad. But I am little spooked, I must admit. Hopefully the asthma was a one-off. And hopefully my technological fixes for the bleeding will continue to do the job.
Because…next week’s edition of this weblog will be the first one from the BBBEEEAAACCCCCHHHHHHHHH! Beach content per se will be limited in the first dispatch from the cottage since Saturday is move-in day and I’ll probably do the writing on the drive down. But get your anticipatory juices flowing (“anticipatory juices”?!? What the hell does THAT mean???). My rebuilt respiratory system means I won’t be able to spend much time on the actual sand-blowing beach, and no time at all in the surf. So I’ll be forced…forced!...to spend the two week trip hunting reptiles and amphibians and other natural elements for photography. I’ve already gone out on a limb. I’m predicting a rattlesnake this year. Remember you heard it here first!
Thanks to you all for putting up with my recounting/whining about my continual health travails. See you next week, from a perch on the beautiful Atlantic coastal strand!
Notes
[1] http://sites.duke.edu/niou/files/2011/06/goldstone-bates-etal.pdf
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Systems Ecology was an actual field of academic endeavor. There was research money, there were professorships and students and institutes. We studied such esoterica as how and why communities and populations prospered, how and why they went to war, how and why they sorted things out to yield the biosphere as we see it.
Last week here in Cancer Land (copyright, trademark), correspondence and conversation were very active. Several of those threads involved consideration of various aspects of death. Talking about death and dying triggered wistful nostalgia for one of the treasured rituals of academia—talking shop at the local pub.
We worried—a lot—about how to define an “ecosystem”. Well, maybe “worried” is too strong a word. We debated it. Over endless beer and pizza, in college-town bars around the world. And every one of those discussions, over the 50 year lifetime of the field of Systems Ecology, included this question: is a road killed opossum (or, depending on the geographical location in which the beer was flowing, badger, prairie dog, porcupine, skunk, marmot, wallaby, gerbil, fox, pangolin, anteater, agouti, armadillo, aardvark, aardwolf, etc.) an “ecosystem”?
After that discussion incubated for a pitcher or two, a side conversation arose. At issue down the quiet end of the table was whether embalming and coffin burial made dead humans less of an ecosystem than simple, unembalmed, unboxed burial a couple meters down in the soil column.
A rarely-stated assumption shoring up the whole debate was the universally-accepted axiom (Oh yeah. This term borrowed from the jargon of mathematical proof reminds me to remind you not to get me started regarding the nature and “reality” of mathematics itself. This topic requires its own blog entry further down the muddy path we’re hiking here) that “life” itself is not possible absent “death”. Ecosystems function via cyclical processes. Cycling of water, carbon, nutrient elements, gasses, and physical space are the cogs on which the machinery of life is constructed. “Cycling” in this case means that individual organisms claim a fraction of the physical universe temporarily for themselves, and later return the borrowed bits. For the life of the organism, the atoms and molecules compiled from the ether stay with it. When the organism dies, its molecules and atoms return to the universal pool from which they were taken, enabling another organism to dip into the pool and extract its own molecules and atoms.
Without death, eternally living things would become a unidirectional sink for the chemicals that enable life. Immortality, weirdly, would guarantee universal extinction. Our hypothetical undying creature would harvest the matter of the universe cumulatively. Eventually, the universe would consist of one enormous organism with nothing to eat. When that sucker starved and died, that would be it. The end of existence.
So we need death. Sigh. Still, there may be a less radical way out of the trap. What we can do…or at least try to do…is make our lives so rich and wonderful for the people around us that death becomes irrelevant. If we’ve done our job, and filled the space around us with laughter and love and teaching and learning, if we’ve bound ourselves to our others in intricate and ongoing ways, our corporeal selves become simple window-dressing. If we’ve done our job, nobody will even notice we’re gone. Because we’re integral and always with our people, in their thought and in their humor, in their perspective and in their hearts. Fundamentally, we are so much a part of their lives that we cannot be dissected out. They are living with us…or stuck with us, depending on how successful we’ve been at enriching their lives without imposing on them… . Our death doesn’t change that compact. Hell, if we’ve done our job really, really well, we are bigger, funnier and smarter in their lives than in ours, because we’re partnered up with their own footprints, filling interstices that help them complete themselves.
Whoa. I just read the above paragraphs. Pretty long-winded way to get to the point of this week’s posting. Which is this: cancer, for those of us unlucky enough to experience it, is a wake-up call. To get off our butts and live…really LIVE…every single day. Because it’s not just cancer. Or any disease, or other specific causes of death. Death is, in fact, a fundamental and necessary parameter for a functional universe. So ALL of us, cancer or not, sick or healthy, in whatever condition we find ourselves, need to Live ‘Em While We Got ‘Em. Because we only get to borrow them, not keep them.
As I explained last week, for the past few weeks, my days were getting pretty damned uncomfortable. Palliative Care expert Dr. S futzed with my meds, and made some suggestions about how I timed out my daily doses. Added a second anti-nausea drug, one that would also assist the THC in generating some appetite so I could “eat” my medical “food” more comfortably. Gave me a scrip for a high-powered antibiotic designed to suppress acute pneumonia.
All of which worked. When I went back to see Dr. last Wednesday, I reported that I was feeling better. Was getting my full calorie ration and maintaining—even gaining—weight. Was managing to “exercise”. The latter in quotes because I am so weak after a year of parking my butt in a recliner that I can only manage to walk, slowly, for short distances. But, after a year in a recliner, I CAN walk, slowly, for short distances.
And I really, really need to build up my stamina. I am anticipating having an awesome couple of weeks at the beach. I want to be able to get out into all of the accessible habitats for nature photography and specifically for photographing reptiles and amphibians. I want to be able to serve as daily cook, pumping out suppers worthy of a seriously relaxing vacation in a house full of old friends, children, and friends of children.
So I have filled all my scrips, counted up the pills and tablets, purchased several liters of expectorant cough syrup to help thin the mucous that accumulates in my throat and mouth, and started to sort out the stuff I’m going to need to function, crippled as I may be, on the gorgeous east cost barrier islands ecosystems. I have just about two weeks to get my shit together before we head for the Outer Banks. So this coming week I’ll be attempting to up my level of exercise and do the shakedown cruises for timing my medications.
Check back next week for all the anticipatory details. Oh yeah. The antibiotic runs out, I think, tomorrow. I’m really, really hoping my throat doesn’t immediately decompose back into the bloody mess it was a couple weeks ago. But apparently things are pretty beat up in there, so it’s possible I’ll be stuck with a septic nightmare for the foreseeable future.
Beats the alternative. Thanks for being here, everybody. I love you all. And don’t forget—Live ‘Em While You Got ‘Em. Because they’re not forever. Rock on!!!
Ever wonder what the hell a “fortnight” means? Oh, I know that you know that it means “two weeks”. So before you get yourself in a high dudgeon (ever wonder what the hell a “high dudgeon” means? Oh, I know that you know that it…smack!...Thwack!...thanks, I…I needed that. I’m better now. Really. Better. Now.)…anyway, where were we? Oh yeah. “Fortnight”.
Merriam-Webster Online (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fortnight) provides basic etymology: “Middle English fourtenight, alteration of fourtene night, from Old English fēowertȳne niht fourteen nights”.
There you have it. “Fourteen Nights”. Clear. Simple. Could hardly be more obvious. That is, unless you think about it for a moment. I mean, here we got “fortnight”. OK, but then why isn’t there a “fiftnight”. And a “sixtnight”. “Seventnight”. Etc. you get the picture. The real question, the one nobody’s answering, is why does “Fourteen Nights” get its own special pop-quiz-in-the-high-school-vocabulary-class meaning when so many (well, all, really) other aggregations of nights don’t get squat?
I’m not prepared to answer. And neither, near as I can tell, is Merriam-Webster. If I was inclined to conspiracy theorizing (which I’m generally not, although I love collecting other people’s conspiracy theories. And I’m quite capable of pasting together quasi-credible conspiracy theories of my own, which I find to be entertaining as a dilettante artistry outlet for my rich-but-rather-jumbled-and-nonlinear grab-bag of stream-of-consciousness), I might discern The Hand of Satan, or perhaps some convoluted Vulcan mind-meld of Free Masons, Daughters of the American Revolution, Elk’s Club, Webelos, the Isaac Walton League, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, all converging on Alex Jones’ broadcast studio with intent to propagate rumors of the “End Times” and so sell more of their pre-packaged “New World Order Survival Kits” containing bottled water, canned beef stew, dried apricots, fish hooks, and a pack of AA batteries, all compiled weekly from the local Wal Mart and sold over the web to the almost 60% (!!!) of U.S. citizens who don’t believe in evolution but who do believe that the government they deride as moribund and incompetent faked the moon landings on a sound stage in a back alley near the “China Town” gate in Los Angeles.
Umm…ok, where were we before we got off on that worrisome tangent? Oh, I know. Fortnight. Two weeks. Here’s why I dragged you through all that crap in the paragraphs immediately above.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been feeling pretty crappy. No longer getting stronger every day, I was in fact getting weaker. Throat sore and bloody. Energy level, nonexistent. Constantly nauseous. Could not get close to the volume of U.N. emergency rations needed to maintain my body weight. Could not get any thing done. Not even writing. And when I’m having trouble writing, you KNOW something is seriously wrong.
So we set up an appointment with my palliative care guy, Dr. S. I had seen him just 3 or 4 weeks ago, so he was surprised to find me back in his office. I went through the list of problems with him. He quizzed me a bit. Pulled out my (now very thick and ungainly) file, reviewed the latest dozen pages.
I noted that in a few weeks, I would be heading for the beaches of the Outer Banks. This energized him. “OK” he said. “We have to get you feeling as good as you can feel so you enjoy your vacation”. With this goal firmly in mind, we went down my list of medications. Zofran for nausea. Dilaudid for pain. Xanax and Duloxetine for depression and anxiety. THC for appetite and tension. Mertazepine for sleeping. And over-the-counter antihistamines and expectorants to get me through the night relatively dry, or at least not risking drowning in my own bodily secretions, a la several of the former drummers for Spinal Tap.
We re-jiggered some of the meds. Upped the dose of dilaudid. Added Reglan, another anti-nauseal that also enhances gut processes, in hopes that I could make my daily calorie minimum with less travail. And, most importantly, it turns out, put me on a new antibiotic. For some reason, Dr. S (and I believe that surgeon Dr. H would agree with him) was reluctant to treat my raw and bloody throat as if it were infected. I’m not completely sure why. We talked some about inducing drug resistance in my microbial flora, and considered the possibility that my throat might be chronically infected for rests of my life and would just have to become part of my “new normal” personal world. After much discussion, Dr. S came up with a new antibiotic that my internal microbial ecosystems had never seen. Suggested I try out the new drug regime and see how I feel. We agreed to meet again in a week (that would be this coming Wednesday) to review progress and decide what, if anything, more needed to be done to get me in condition to enjoy a comfortable, relaxing vacation.
So this is my third day on the antibiotic. The first couple days, the drug blitzed my throat infection. The alternation of bloody and foamy mucous with bloody and slimy mucous ceased, and the stink of the rotting throat tissues receded. Today, the infection seems to be fighting back a bit. There’s a little blood in my throat, mucous volume is increased (although nowhere near what it was before I started on the AB), and the weird onion/sulfur taste of my saliva returned, although again at a lower level than before.
But over all, Dr. S did a miracle job. Past two days I was full of energy. Went for long(ish) hikes at the Patuxent reserve, got back into writing, lined up some new art stuff to play with. Today I was just a bit less healthy. But I think I needed to take a break from the higher activity. My leg muscles were stiff and crampy, which is no surprise given that they’ve been parked in a recliner for weeks before I took them out for two days of walking. So today I stayed home, read more of the two new books on the Soviet/German front in World War Two, got in some serious guitar practice—almost an hour’s worth, before my fingers started to get raw and bloody.
So, if I continue to feel as good as I have the past few days, I’ll be back on the path to a more comfortable quality-of-life. And I’ll be more than ready to hit the beach. I can not wait to get cranking on some cooking, using the abundant produce of the Middle Atlantic summer. And to get out into the woodlands and wetlands of the OBX.
And if I do not continue to rock and roll toward a comfortable quality-of-life, why, I have the appointment already scheduled to take another shot at getting me there.
So, overall this has been a good week. With a little luck, next week will be even better. And a couple weeks after that, I’ll be stalking cottonmouths, kingsnakes, and legless lizards on Hatteras Island.
Awesome! My love and thanks to you all. Hope your summer is shaping up to be kicking ass and taking names. I know mine will.
