Happy Birthday to my daddy!

Today my father is 83 years old. A couple of months ago, we weren't sure he'd be alive to celebrate, so this is an incredible day. He'd been to the doctor, and gotten an initial diagnosis that shocked and frightened us -- bone cancer.

Wow. Hearing words like that just make anything else in the world seem so unimportant. Following  the diagnosis of breast cancer my mother got last year, we were doubly troubled and hit with the reality that as much as we didn't want to face it, our parents are elderly and Death is raising his scythe and looking our way.

After a visit with a cancer specialist, various tests and a bone marrow biopsy, we got better news:  not bone cancer, but a disease of the bone marrow called myelofibrosis. Not the best news, but better.

Due to Daddy's age, his doctor doesn't plan on doing a bone marrow transplant, and while he's feeling okay, Daddy won't get any of the other treatments available. It seems the treatment is sometimes worse than the disease.

Daddy's back to work, though on a lighter schedule, and feeling pretty upbeat about the whole thing. So we soldier on, and cherish every day we have with Daddy and Mama.

I've shown pictures of Daddy before, but I thought I'd post some more on this special day. First up is from when he was in the Army. Daddy spent two years active duty, and many more in the Reserves. I remember him going off to his weekend and summer assignments when I was little.

I made a shadow box for him a few years ago, and this was one of the pictures in it. Like many war veterans, Daddy never liked to talk about his experiences much, except with his good friend, Jim. Only recently has he come to share his veteran status. He's had me make decals for his car, and he bought a tag from the license bureau. I really need to get a picture of the decals, they take up most of the lower rear window!

This is his baby picture, which I'm repairing in Photoshop. Nearly done, just need some adjustment layers and a few other tweaks. Isn't he adorably grumpy? I love his sausage curl.

This one is grainy and blurry, because it was taken from a video, which in turn had been converted from an old film. It was made in the 1960s when Daddy and a group of his friends and coworkers had a gig at the old Daniel Boone Amusement Park, in Hillsboro, NC.

Those guys loved doing the Wild West act, always working on new scripts and looking for things to make their shows better. Daddy was "Black Bart", and along with "his brother" -- who I don't think ever had any other name -- played by his best friend, lead an outlaw gang that was the bane of the sheriff and his deputies, not to mention the "townsfolk" they regularly terrorized.

Happy birthday, Daddy! You're still the greatest.

So there you have it, Gentle Readers, another trip down nostalgia lane. Take care, and eat some cake.

Whoa! I think I fell off the Internet!

Or something equally ridiculous. But then, you know me, ridiculous is my middle name. snort

Anyway, for those of you who are interested -- or who are masochists, which is really the same thing if you read here, isn't it? -- I thought I'd update you all on what's going on with Daddy.

After some blood work and a bone scan, we were no closer to finding out what was going on. His PSA is up, but then he's 82 years old and that wasn't very shocking news. There was something funny in his other blood work, which the doctor said needed further study. It could be due to the prostate, or it could be something else.

We won't mention the bone cancer thing. Nuh-uh. Nope. shiver

Hence his scheduling of a bone marrow biopsy, which Daddy had on Wednesday. Ouch. They had to go in three times to get enough sample to satisfy the doctor's assistant. We'll know sometime this week (next week? whatever) what the results from that are, and let me tell you, the waiting is horrible.

Mama, in the meanwhile, is sailing through towards the end of her chemo treatments. Her hair is coming back, and she's sporting a rather nifty almost-pixie cut.

I made it through the birthday, a week ago yesterday. Made myself a nifty cake, which I named Blood and Bone. It was a Walking Dead theme, with an image of my boyfriend, Daryl Dixon.

Yeah. Total zombie freak here. What can I say? There's just something about a redneck man...

I've got pictures that Number One took with his cell phone. I'm waiting for him to upload them and send them over to me, and I'll post them.

It was a pretty cool cake, and tasty, if I say so myself. Which I just did. But I'm awesome that way, as you all know.

On the writing front, I'm getting my butt back in gear to finish that blasted print formatting, which turned into a rewrite/edit marathon. At this point, I'm pretty sick of looking at the book, but I will press on.

So if you were by some chance thinking of buying my book, wait until you see that the second edition is up. It's much better, honestly, and I fixed some errors that slipped through the first time.

So, that's the news from the front, Gentle Readers. Take care, and get thee in for a physical.

So, I had some stuff to blog about...

but we got some pretty bad news the other day about my father's health, a first diagnosis of bone cancer. We'll know more after tomorrow, when he sees a cancer specialist.

As you can imagine, the whole family is devastated. Mama is almost done with the chemo treatments for her breast cancer, and we had been looking forward to celebrating.

Now this, in my normally perfectly healthy Daddy. We are so sad, but trying to think positively.

I'll be back to post later this week, Gentle Readers. Until then, carry on and think love.

happy birthday Daddy!

Today is my father's birthday, he is 79 years old and still works full-time. He's been on vacation this week and is bored out of his mind, ready to go back to work! This whole being bored thing is something I don't get, 'cause I always have plenty of stuff to do, but that's a story for another day. I may have mentioned that my parents are hard to buy gifts for, as they don't have any hobbies or interests (other than TV--westerns and soap operas: gah!), so I decided to give them a scrapbook and make pages for it when it's gift-giving time.

These pages are the first two I've made for the book, which is a simple post-bound book I picked up somewhere, probably on sale since I hate paying full price for anything. (That's the Scot in me, I guess: my father's family is almost all Scottish descent, in America for almost 400 years!) I put a couple of tags so he could put the dates and/or the names of the people in the pictures.

I love my daddy. He's had a hard life but always did the best he could for his family. He never had a good role model to be a father but he turned out to be a pretty good one. As I've grown up and raised my own children, I've come to understand how hard parenting is and learned to forgive a lot of things my parents weren't so good at early on.

Blessed be.