Why I Won't Be at WorldCon

A couple of people have e-mailed to ask why my name is no longer on the guest list for San Antonio WorldCon.  Don't worry.  I didn't get kicked out for bad behavior.  Here's the scoop.

Judy and I bought our memberships to WorldCon a couple of years ago, and we got our hotel reservations as soon as they became available. We were really looking forward to the convention, to getting together with old friends and to making new ones.  But sometimes life throws you a curve.

If you've been reading this blog for a long time, you might recall that in 2007 Judy was diagnosed with small-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.  I haven't talked about this often on the blog, since the blog is more or less my escape from reality, but maybe it's time for an update. 

The kind of lymphoma Judy has isn't curable, but it's treatable, and since 2007 Judy has been through innumerable clinical trials and rounds of chemo.  Okay, maybe not innumerable, but more than I'm able to enumerate.  Let's just say there've been a lot and that it's been tough.  Judy's borne it all with grace and courage as those of you know know her would expect.  

Last fall, something strange showed up on a PET scan.  Even after a biopsy, the doctors weren't sure what it was, so we were sent to the doctor at M. D. Anderson who specializes in unknowns.  She thought the lesion was sarcoma, and Judy started chemo for that.  The chemo didn't work, so they tried radiation, six weeks of it, five days a week.  That "arrested" the sarcoma, but other lesions appeared.  Judy's lymphoma doctor was sure they weren't lymphoma, but other doctors weren't.  Judy had another biopsy.  Even after that, some of the doctors weren't 100% convinced, but Judy's lymphoma doctor was.  He released her to a sarcoma doctor.

On August 5, Judy started a new chemo regimen.  It required her to be in the hospital for six nights, as some of the chemo was administered for twenty-four hours a day.  The chemo has some serious side-effects, and Judy had to be closely monitored.  Her blood counts were so low at the end of the period that she had to have a transfusion, which meant another night in the hospital.  There are two weeks between the treatments.  I won't go into detail, but they're no picnic, either. 

If the treatment is working, there will be five more rounds.  The second one will begin today or tomorrow and will still be going on during the weekend of WorldCon, so there was just no way we could be there.  We won't be at Bouchercon, either, I'm sorry to say.  Maybe next year.

Judy, as usual, is taking all this a lot better than I am.  All we can do is hope that the treatment works.  We're hanging in and trying to take it a day at a time, which is a lot easier said than done, as some of you who have gone through similar experiences know all too well.

I probably won't have much more to say about this until the treatments are over, but if the blog posts become sporadic or even stop for a while, you'll know why.