In the last week, I had a PET Scan that surveyed my neck down for cancer, a Brain MRI to look for changes from my last scan, and lab work. And they were clear! Clear of cancer I mean. There are still tumors (masses of dead cells), there is still damage to my spine, and there is still abnormal labwork, but it’s abnormal in the ways it has been abnormal for the last year, so in essence, normal for me.
Am I relieved? Of course! So relieved!
Am I back to my optimistic, positive, pollyanna self? Well…I seem to need to sit with this news for a while, and it’s not like you just bounce back from thinking the cancer is growing again…there is the whole “well, why has my pain been increasing” question. And I have to accept that there will always be pain, that managing it is my new reality, and that some of it could have been stress-related from the PTSD over the last year.
So friends, all this means I have another 6-month lease on life!
So, I pulled the trigger on some more trips. In fact, there are still a few openings for a yoga and writing retreat in March with Anish if any of you are interested.
I had intended to write this post yesterday after all the test results had come in, but it turns out I needed a day.
I woke up like normal, drank my coffee with mushroom powders, and picked up and finished The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. When looking for the next book to read, I surveyed the shelves filled with cancer-related books, and just had to stop.
So if I’m not going to die yet of cancer yet, I’m going to go read about cancer and dying? No. Not today.
Cancer just hijacks your life. Especially with the chronic pain I’m experiencing now, well into remission. There is not a day that I’m not reminded that I could die soon, or not. Could be 1 year, maybe 5, maybe even 15! Good luck NOT thinking about that every day.
I needed a day to marinate in it, and I gave myself a 100% unstructured, uncommitted day yesterday, where I only tried to ride the wave of existence, knowing I don’t have an active cancer, and If that doesn’t elicit joy, then what are we even doing here?
I took a walk. This week I haven’t been doing yoga, in fact, I haven’t done yoga in about a month…the fears and all, but I have been going on walks: early morning walks before the sun is even up. I talk walks in the icy morning, stepping gingerly down the road with my yak tracks on, knowing my spine is like a pretzel stick, brittle and prone to breaking when it falls to the floor.
Yesterday I went walking just after sunrise and was rewarded with light and color. It was one of the first days in Bend with a dusting of snow on the ground, and even though the paths were treacherous with ice, it was so worth it to have those views and that reframe. The day before, darkness; today, I was walking out of the dark.
Can I surf the roller coaster of emotions instead of sink into them?
Ride the wave of being alive today.
Ride the wave of being alive today.
Ride the wave of being alive today. Became my mantra as I gingerly walked the world awake.
Ride the wave of being alive today.
What will 2026 look like now? I have decided I need some more structure to my days, and the many groups that I’ve joined will help in that: writing groups, book clubs, creative freelancing groups, and cancer survivor groups. A renewed commitment to adding more structure to my days may help erect some scaffolding and assist in giving me a way to pull myself out of the listlessness that was December. Periods of time where I explore deep ideas and read a lot. And I’ll continue taking walks, lots of walks. Reading, walking, thinking, writing; I’m kind of designing the perfect life. I can’t adventure as much, but I’m living a version of my life that’s pretty good right now. I know challenging and scary things are around the corner, ready to jump out at me and knock me down. (That goes for all of us. The world is just plain SCARY right now!) But today I’m standing and walking in the light.
For our final 2026 Speaker Series we welcome back a previous speaker, local triple crown thru-hiker Renee “She-ra” Patrick. In late 2024, Renee was diagnosed with advanced cancer that left her in a wheelchair and unable to carry a backpack due to extensive neck and spine damage. Now in remission and walking again, Renee is exploring how to continue hiking and adventuring in a body that has dramatically changed. She successfully completed a 170-mile hike of the Portuguese Camino by using a luggage transport service, and continues to investigate alternative forms of travel so she can continue to find solace and connection in the outdoors.
Join us to re-connect with Renee and explore a topic that so many of us can relate to in our own way, what it looks like to adventure when our body changes.
How am I doing? Let’s see. It’s the last day of 2025. It’s the eve-eve of my next PET scan, or the first PET scan since my cancer has been in remission. I’m not doing well. In a way, my remission has been haunting me, especially fiercely the past month or so.
I’ve been dismal and down in this season of laughter and joy, but I’ve been high too…these emotions rollercoaster through me, sometimes on an hourly basis, where I can be delighted and hopeful, followed by a deep sorrow that drips off me and weighs my body in heaviness.
Ask me to my face, and yes, I’m doing fine, “Grateful to be here!” I reply cheerfully. To a few, I’ll say, “I’m struggling,” like when Kirk comes home to find me in tears and just enfolds me in a big hug. To myself, I say, “What is the point?” I’m finding this listlessness is manifesting in me forgetting to take my meds. I’ll have breakfast or lunch and then realize two hours later that my pillbox is still full. I hurriedly eat a handful of nuts or a spoonful of peanut butter to soften the landing of the gel caps on my stomach lining.
I am haunted. Haunted by what these next few scans will reveal.
If the scans show there are no new growths, then I have to accept that the increasing pain and discomfort I’ve been feeling over the last month is either in my imagination or my body still coming to terms with being irreparably damaged.
If the scans show there are new growths, maybe it’s a relief? Then these next months will be a series of appointments, and I don’t need to think too much. I will just need to go with it and renew my low-sugar, low-processed food habits.
It’s like I’m just now figuring out how to live with this disease, and it’s not going smoothly. I know all the tricks and tools: go for a walk, get coffee with a friend, read a book, go to yoga, tell Kirk and my closest friends the truth, take a bath. And it all works, for a short while. It pulls me up and out of the funk, but now it seems my default state is in the muck when before it was in the air, floating on thermals above the fray.
And there has been joy….really, there has been – islands of happiness, or just plain contentedness.
Christmas with my mom and brother.
Dan and I walking along the Lake Martin swamp where we saw a huge gator sunning himself on a log.
Brooke and Adryon meeting us for dinner and my first sip of a Red Chair beer in a few years.
Carrie giving me a make-over.
Marina having us over for quiche and cheesecake.
Cross country skiing again.
Kirk bought me new cross-country skis with metal edges for Christmas. They are quite a luxury as I have only ever owned garage-sale skis from decades past. We took them out to our favorite snow park the day after I got home from Louisiana; the sun on my face, and the quiet swooshing of the skis in the tracks were a balm to my overthinking brain.
Before we left the parking lot, I couldn’t seem to remember how my ski boots worked. It had only been two years since I had skied last, but it was like I had never worn these boots before. Turns out I had grabbed Kirk’s boots, which I had in fact, never worn before. Ha! I can still laugh at myself. The skiing was good, until it wasn’t. It turns out that I can’t use my left pole, and I can’t go uphill. The pressure of the poles, especially when trying to climb anything, hurts my left shoulder too much. In fact, four days after the last ski, my neck and shoulders are so sore that I’m taking daily pain meds again. Is this cancer? Or is this skiing for the first time in two years?
Keep going. I just have to tell myself to keep going.
Maybe the pressure valve that is questioning my damaged body will be released after these next scans, and then I can keep going. I have a number of things I want to do in the new year, but am waiting for these scans to make any plans… I want to be grateful, but I am not sure how to feel most days. Sometimes my morning walk will be enough to trick my brain into being hopeful, and I come home and make my smoothie of broccoli sprouts, spinach, ginger root, flax, chia, hemp seeds, nuts, and strawberries, but sometimes the hope masks itself in feeling normal and takes me to the bakery where I stand in line for something sweet.
I investigate other hiking options: llamas! I could hike with llamas! Or do a car-supported hike, as many people do on long trails when they meet friends or family at road crossings, the car filled with camping gear, water, and food. Or I could do another Camino – I’ve already started outlining what the Camino Ingles would look like. Or tap the friends who said the would sherpa for me. Oh, and then there are the carts. I asked Reddit about hiking with carts, and after a lot of “you’re stupid for asking that question,” I got a few helpful replies, but ultimately I think carts work best on pavement, and that’s not the kind of hiking I’m hoping to do right now.
Is this clinging to hiking an unwillingness to give up the last 24 years of my life when hiking was my all and everything? Probably. I was one of those lucky few who found what lit them up inside, who found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, who found true freedom and purpose in a life lived on trail. I’m not quite willing to give that up, which may be, or probably is, at the root of my despair.
There are many disabled folks who continue to hike: Bill Irwin hiked blind. Wheelchair Bob is out on the PCT all the time, and a local friend, Geoff Babb, even invented the Advenchair, an all-terrain wheelchair, so he could still get around after his stroke. Hiking with a disability takes more time and more effort, but it’s possible. It’s possible. It’s possible.
Oh, the effort though. I’m getting caught up in the effort of doing all the “right” things to help mitigate my body feeling like a 500-pound elephant sinking into the sea. A part of me knows I will get through this, and may even return to my resting disposition in the clouds. A part of me knows letting myself feel the feelings may be the only way through, and a part of me needs to keep finding the effort that leads to small joys.
This isn’t a cry for help, I’ve done that already. This is an effort to be real with you about those “How am I doing?” questions.
I guess the next update will be in the aftermath of my PET scan, brain MRI, and labs. I’ll be a completely different person then.
Finding joy on the PCT was part of why I kept hiking and made it my career.
Maybe I’ve been going about this year all wrong. Ok, I’m going to backtrack a bit…I don’t think I’ve done it all wrong, there have been a lot of beautiful moments, like when Amber opened up her house to us to have an exuberant birthday party with about fifty wonderful souls who rallied around me even when I spent the day puking. Like when Kirk and I went snorkeling in warm Gulf waters this May, or when I finished the Camino in Spain with two new friends. Is it this book project that’s tethering me to the pain of the year? What if I let that thread go for a while? What if I let the scab grow, which might be faster to do if I’m not picking at it all the time by trying to write too soon?
I’m going to choose joy for a while and see where that leads me.
And yes, that still involves writing, surprise!
Yesterday, I was working through an exercise from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft book, the one about reading your work aloud and having fun with the sound and play of words, and something blossomed inside. I was writing around a scene on one of my hikes, a day filled with laughter and play, and I kept returning to that story again and again over the day. I wanted to be in it. I wanted to keep that scene fresh in my mind because the feeling was so different than writing about how my radiation has made my lower back perpetually painful and tight, or how a different approach to the tumors that surrounded my brain could have left me with memory loss or cognition problems. I want to think about something else for a while.
The hangover from that joy has been growing. I decided shortly after writing that exercise that I wouldn’t feel guilty about having christmas cookies for breakfast. I did eat a few nuts so that I got the protein that I need while taking my morning medications, but I ate cookies. I ate cookies dipped in whipped cream and I didn’t feel guilty about it at all! I decided to take the rest of the year off from guilt as well. If life is indeed short, what would it feel like to search for and create joy while saying goodbye to guilt?
Anyone want to give it a try with me?
Let’s make this a fun experiment…because that’s what I like to do! Let me know how it goes for you: the seeking joy and forgetting guilt for a while part. Perhaps in this next phase of trying to figure out who I am now, I will write about how my experiment is going, and also tell some stories from some of your experiments. When I worked at the publishing company for four years, that time was primarily filled with writing profiles on artists and businesses around town. It wasn’t quite journalism; it was finding what was interesting, compelling, and unique about these community members and sharing that through my writing. What if we do some of that with these stories?
I’m posting this over at Substack as well where commenting is easier.All my posts are FREE. Just click ‘none’ on the subscription options.
In happier times…just a few days ago in fact! At the ONDA Christmas party with Phyllisand Mary, two amazing women.
I’m so tired. Maybe it’s the ghost of the impending anniversaries from December 2024 and learning the truth about my injuries, but what’s my excuse this year? I’m discombobulated. I’m depressed. I’m in pain, and I’m grieving for something. I think it’s for who I used to be.
Yesterday I sunk into the depths of a dispair that I didn’t know existed, but today I woke up determined to have a better day. That looks like standing up without bracing for the rushing pain of low blood pressure in my head and shoulders, and instead slowly moving through it, anticipating the other side of the dizzyness, not getting derailed by the dizziness. That looks like leaving the house to write at a coffee shop where I can type these sentences with the accountability of being a human in public.
I don’t yet have the words to explain why I dip into these deep chasms of weeping, but when I try to understand, when I type out the sentiment behind the feeling, I can at least distance myself from it enough to see it a bit more objectively. That perspective takes on more weight as I circle around and around the idea of writing a book about my cancer experience. “Write from the scar, not the wound,” author Cheri Kephart said in her workshop, and that makes sense for a book. My book will be written from the scar, but this blog is written from the wound. From the bloody front lines of a life torn apart and knitting itself back together. At times I think I’m healing and toughing up, but yesterday reveals that I’m still raw and bleeding. The wound is tender and sore.
Bits from this blog may end up in the book, but I imagine the book will look back on this experience from a larger scale (hello fractal, my old friend). It will be putting all the pieces back together as a work of art, with thought and craft and structure… but now I’m still discovering what the pieces are, and what shapes they take. Writing here is sometimes messy, unshaped, uneven, and scattered, but it’s helping me find the pieces far faster than if I were stewing in this malaise and pain without getting it out into the open and letting it breathe. Writing from the wound is completely appropriate to this phase where I’m trying to make sense of what it means to almost die, to get a second chance at life, to confront my limitations in this new body, all within the context of losing my Dad just a few months ago.
Saw this on Substack and thought it appropriate, is depressed almost the same as stressed? In dessert speak, that is.
In a way, remission has been harder than treatment. At least during the treatment phase, I had a reason for being tired all the time, I had an excuse for staying in bed and not answering my emails. But after? Maybe it’s the scanxiety (the anxiety of the cancer coming back…all to be revealed in my next scans in early January, and every three months after…for the rest of my life) or it could be PTSD from my close brush with death a year ago. Or maybe there is no reason, and it’s just one big pile of shit that threatens to suffocate me each day.
Some days I don’t feel better, and wonder, is this the new normal? Now I’m starting to understand why people give up, why they don’t want to be alive with cancer anymore. But just thinking that thought scares me into thinking that thought will invite it back. If our minds are that powerful, can thinking about it coming back open the door? (proceeds to tear hair out)
Writing here has been such a lifeline; that’s a reason not to tear my hair out. Fun fact: my hair was thinning during the chemo process, but now it’s growing back, and in certain mirrors I catch a glimpse of myself with 2 inch hairs standing up from my part line; it does make me giggle (actually, you can see it in the photo above!). Through writing, I’ve been in conversation with myself and with you, and these connections have been everything. I’m sending out holiday cards this year, and it’s truly overwhelming. I look at the list of people who donated to my go fund me, who sent cards and care packages, who dropped off meals and stopped by for a visit, and there is not enough stationery or stamps to write enough cards. Hundreds of you came through for me this year, and even if you don’t get a card in the mail, please know how important you were and are to me. I’m so rich in friendship, true connection, and love that I know none of this has to be faced alone, even when I feel alone.
So let’s end this blog post on a high note. Thank you for listening. Even if it feels like I am screaming into the void, I know you are listening and care. That helps so much.
For today’s walk I listened to music. It’s a simply wonderful combination: walking and song.
I want you to have an experience with these posts; there are links to songs, videos, other websites, and many various adventures. So here is your invitation to leave the tab open and return to find the link to the podcast or watch the movie. Take a walk and play the song. Think some thoughts and make some notes, or just leave space to let them emerge as the morning or afternoon unfolds. You may need an hour, or two…sometimes you might need a week for your brain to untangle and release. At least that’s how I work. You do you.
Today’s song is Frank Sinatra Jr’s Black Night. If you liked that one, you also might like The Ocean by Richard Hawley, The Rip by Portishead, or Empire Ants by The Gorillaz. The crescendo of each song echoes somewhere deep inside. You know how I wrote about using sound vibrations earlier this year to help kill the cancer? I think that’s what these songs do too. They vibrate something vital inside me, and the result is elation and joy. I hope for you too.
Today I want to talk about creativity as a force for survival.
When my neck started spasming last year, the aspen trees in the glaciated gorges of Steens Mountain had just started to turn gold. I was leading a trail maintenance trip for National Public Lands Day, and I knew something was very wrong. I was due to fly out the very next day to start a 400-mile thru-hike of the Pinhoti Trail, which I would connect to the Benton MacKaye Trail, turn east, and hike to its terminus at Springer Mountain (also the start of the Appalachian Trail). I planned to bookend the hike with a visit to Pinhoti Fest before I started walking, and finish with the Benton MacKaye Trail Association’s Annual Meeting and Hike Fest at Unicoi Lodge in Helen, Georgia. I intended to make further connections with the founders and stewards of both trail organizations to explore how I could add my expertise to their trails with my long-distance trail consulting business. This was a working hike, but also my vacation. Where do I stop and my job begin? I’ve never really known, having always (or most of the time) worked within a passion.
That beautiful fall day changed everything. Once my neck started to spasm on the last evening of the trip, the jolts continued to shock me, racing from my brain, down my spine. I had no clue what was going on, and quickly said an early goodnight to my volunteers as tears streamed down my face. I thought rest and lying down might ease the bewildering condition, but no. My neck spasmed about every five minutes during the long, late-September night. I cried with fear and pain, hoping the others couldn’t hear the extent of my anguish. Something was very wrong.
I avoided facing the truth even after I managed to make the five-hour drive back to Bend and directly to an urgent care. An exam showed nothing of concern, so we blamed the spasms on a few nights of a poor pillow. I could still hike, right? Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Hurricane Helen had just hit land, tearing up the communities, towns, trails, and mountains where I had planned to hike. I rebooked my flight for a few days hence to see how my neck and the storms would play out.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, to my body or the inland communities along the Appalachians, but one thing was clear: much of the region I was planning to hike in was devastated. On the bright side, the Alabama portion of the Pinhoti Trail was spared, but it seemed in poor taste to frolic down the trail when people were suffering just a short distance away in Georgia.
The east coast hike wasn’t going to happen, so I fixated on the Oregon Coast Trail. This 413-mile hike was close to home, had many towns (meaning I could find an easy out if my neck continued to give me grief), and I had already planned to be away from work for a month, so I threw myself into last-minute planning to walk a month along the sea.
I planned to travel to and from the trail all using public transportation; it would be a cool experiment! Since my passion is my work, I started to turn this trip into another opportunity to evaluate the resources and infrastructure of the trail to see how I could improve it from a hiker’s perspective. I decided to start my hike a week out from that urgent care visit, which would give me time to get a few sessions of acupuncture and massage, and push past the pain in my neck to keep going and hike anyway. I’ve done it before, hiked through fresh and recent injuries, that is.
The day before I started my October groundtruthing hike of the Blue Mountains Trail in 2020, I walked out of the house barefoot, and a stray nail sticking up from the door frame tore a fourth-inch chunk out of the sole of my foot. The flapper was deep enough that I had ripped through a significant portion of skin and callus. I panicked, immediately cleaned out the wound, put some antibiotic ointment on it, and elevated my foot until Kirk came home from work. I shook as I showed him the wound, but slowly convinced myself and him that I could keep it cleaned and protected as I hiked for a month solo on a difficult backcountry route in north eastern Oregon. And I went, and I was fine. So I’d be fine this time too, right?
After a week of treatments, I was convinced this Oregon Coast Trail thing was a go. Kirk and I decided to head up to Waldo Lake for the weekend in our camper so he could foilboard while I read in a chair in the sun. I still wasn’t 100 percent, but I had convinced myself I would heal on the hike, much like I had done on the Blue Mountains Trail. The morning we were set to leave, I was stretching when something twinged in my back and I instantly knew I wasn’t going hiking anywhere. All the progress I thought I had made was gone in that twinge. I didn’t tell the rest of my body, though, and I packed up my backpack and headed out for the weekend. Over the next two days, it was apparent that I was having trouble moving normally. Carrying much of anything caused more pain, and I finally voiced out loud that I wouldn’t be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail. I returned home in a slump. Two hikes had now been thwarted in the last week.
Now what?
It wasn’t until I was on a morning walk recently that last year’s hiking (or non-hiking) saga gained more shape. I headed out into the frosty morning with freshly charged earbuds in place and strolled along my normal route along the Deschutes River. That morning, I listened to Rich Roll’s podcast featuring author and fellow cancer navigator Suleika Jaouad, and I saw my decisions in the wake of my physical limitations in a new light.
Suleika has experienced survival as a creative act. I read her first book, Between Two Kingdoms, this year, shortly after my diagnosis, and quickly pre-ordered her second book, The Book of Alchemy. The more I learned about her story, the more I identified with her struggles. When I heard her leukemia returned for the third time before the launch of her new book, my heart just bled for her. For us.
Back to last October: when I realized that I would not be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided to go ahead and do it anyway, but from home. I decided to embark on a virtual journey and pretend that I was out plodding through the sand and feeling the rain sting my cheeks in groves of old-growth trees that rim the bluffs over the Pacific Ocean. I would virtually hike the Oregon Coast Trail.
Ever since I set foot on the Appalachian Trail back in 2002, I kept a daily journal. Those hand-written missives from the AT are lost, but from then on, I wrote and posted them online. From my hike during a break from grad school along the West Highland Way, to my thru-hike of the Colorado Trail and the culmination of my summer of leading trail crews, I chronicled the rain, sleet, and snow. The blisters, spider bites, and those few times I caught myself on fire from my beer-can stove. Yes, there were multiple times. Over the years, I shared my joys and struggles with a small group of loyal blog-readers, but more importantly, I found great joy in writing for the love of writing. I didn’t care if anyone else read about day 56 on the Pacific Crest Trail or day 5 on the Sunshine Coast Trail, I loved waking up in the early morning and capturing the feeling of the day before.
So when my body wouldn’t let me hike last fall, I decided to wake up early each morning, read the guidebook (shout out to Bonnie Henderson and her excellent resource), reference the FarOut app for real-time updates from other hikers, study the weather, decide how many miles to walk, where I would camp or find lodging, where I would eat, what interesting things I’d see during the day, and how I would navigate the many gaps in the trail. I wanted to turn this virtual hike into a visual journey as well, so I planned to create a story map that I would build on, publishing each new day on the story map as I would on an actual thru-hike. The Oregon Coast Trail is a logistical melange of hazards like high tides, which make certain sections undoable, or eroding cliffs from a perpetually stormy sea. I wanted to experience those hazards, even if remotely, and decide how I would proceed if I were actually there.
Story mapping had become another passion by this point, and over the past few years, I had been creating them professionally for other organizations. The medium harkened back to my college days where I dove into multi-media projects, combining images with prose, sounds, and even videos. And since my virtual hike was quickly becoming another work/passion project, I decided to add on elements from a second business I had started recently, called Intentional Hiking.
Yes, the title gives it away – with Intentional Hiking, I hosted several conversations a month about ways hikers could cultivate a deeper engagement with the world around them as they were out for a day hike, week-long backpacking trip, or a long thru-hike. I invited experts to talk about things like collecting data for Adventure Scientists, learning how to identify plants and animals to contribute to research projects on iNaturalist, or even how public land management agencies are integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge of indigenous peoples into federal planning processes. To apply this to the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided I would identify several aspects hikers (and I) could engage with as we walked. Those items were categorized and marked on the maps as: Fun Facts, Trail Stuff, Environment, Military History, Exploration History, Tribal Nations, Art and Culture, and Take Action. Each morning, I would wake at my usual 4am, spend the next 4-5 hours researching, writing, and adding on to my story map, and publish that day’s hike on my blog.
By the second week, my creative act had become a bit oppressive, given the sheer amount of time it was taking me to create each day’s exploration. The added weight of my painful body didn’t make things much easier. After my morning creation, my days were filled with appointments. They ranged from sessions with a physical therapist, massage therapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, and my primary care doctor, with little result. I could barely move.
I kept going because that’s what I do. I finished the project on October 31 to reflect when I would have finished in real time. I remember my neck and back were feeling a hair better…in fact, everything was feeling a tad better, that is, until I slipped and fell on a wet floor while shopping on November 1. It was the kind of fall that you knew would be bad on the way down. As my feet flew out from under me, I had long enough to notice the “caution wet floor” sign by my right leg, and also know I was in trouble. I landed hard on my right glute, whiplashed my head, and passed out.
I will tell you the rest of the story another time, but needless to say, my troubles were only getting worse, and I was still about two months out from my cancer diagnosis. Life sucked, but it sucked less when I could focus on things like the virtual Oregon Coast Trail by ignoring my pain as much as I could to do something that brought joy.
I want to say many more things about how the creative act is survival. Many of you have seen it play out in real time through my blog this year, so stay tuned as I unpack more layers of pain and being so that I can continue to not just survive, but thrive through my creativity.
Slueika was in remission for 10 years before her cancer started growing again. The road ahead seems so long that I think the only thing that can get me through this is exploring what it means to be alive, creatively. And what a gift to the world that Slueika and her husband and musician Jon Baptist are giving to the world by doing the same.
Check out American Symphony on Netflix if you want to learn more about these two, they take my breath away.
2025’s Thanksgiving on the River Crew – Cindy, Kirk & Moi (photo courtesy of Cindy)
Kirk and I have had a Thanksgiving tradition of heading to water for the last 10+ years. It probably started because he just loves a flowing river, and even though my river time had been limited before we met, I quickly took to the eddies and riffles as he showed me the ropes of paddling, rafting, and floating downstream.
One of our first trips was a packraft adventure on the North Fork of the John Day River. You can read all about it here:
click for the full post…
We had many other adventures on the water, most frequently coming back to the banks of the Lower Deschutes River as it usually had the most water of any of Oregon’s rivers in late November. We would invite various friends, sometimes it would snow, sometimes it would drop into the single digits, and sometimes those friends never returned for another water-logged Thanksgiving trip…the cold really highlights how a four-day sufferfest can drive people indoors, even if we bring multiple pies.
This year my longtime friend Cindy decided to brave the unknown, and possibly rainy weather to accompany us on our float, and she was rewarded with mild temperatures and minimal splashing as I had asked Kirk to find the smoothest and driest lines through the rapids – my neck and spine still can’t tolerate much jostling.
We launched on Thanksgiving morning and pulled over a few miles later to reheat our feast. I don’t think it was the best of our efforts as my turkey cooking the day before was a bit too zealous and left the meat on the dry side, and we skipped the fancy side-dishes for instant potatoes, stovetop stuffing, canned cranberry sauce, and store-bought pumpkin pie, but it was all gravy. As Edward Abby says, “Hunger is the best sauce,” and the smell of the cooking turkey had started my mouth watering a full day before our dinner.
Dark comes early in late November, but I added some festive cheer with some battery-powered lights and hot cider.
The skies were blue and the nights dark, and we all got a solid 10 hours (or more!) of sleep each night.
It is such a gift to be on the river during this time of year. The blue heron was our steady companion each day on the water, and the sound of the current hushed any background noise that we carried over from day-to-day life.
I’m writing this as much for me as for you. I strive to understand how to be in this body now, and it is constantly changing. But one thing remains the same: I am fragile now. I do have moments when I forget what I’ve been through in the last year, but those are really just fragments of moments. I don’t get to forget for long.
I get head rushes almost every time I stand up; the black spins and pounding at the base of my skull are dazing, so I make sure to go slowly or hang on to something for a few seconds before moving. When I forget and jump to my feet, I meet the errors of my ways: speed. I have to be a slow turtle these days.
The same goes for yoga; I’ve been back at it since August. In the dark morning, I roll up my mat and walk a few cold blocks down to the studio. The 90-degree heat feels delicious. After a slow half hour of movement, I can usually make my way into a true downward dog. I still get dizzy a time or two during the classes, and it’s almost always when my head is below my heart. To recover, I reverse the position and make my way to child’s pose. I think holding the downward dog pose alone could help everything. My glutes and hamstrings have been incredibly tight since returning from the Camino almost two months ago. I can’t fully stretch my legs without gently coaxing them loose for half an hour. Deep twisting of any kind is a no-go.
My spine is stiff with multiple tumor scars, but I am healing, and each scan shows more bone growing back. The name of the game is patience. I’ve never had to have this kind of patience with my body before. I’m looking at years of healing to slowly re-engage with my physical self.
I plan to cross-country ski this winter, but need to be careful because I still have a fracture risk. Downhill skiing is off limits, so is skate skiing, so I plan to immerse myself in pillows of white on blue diamond cross-country ski trails. I’ll visit the ones that don’t have too many big hills to lessen the chance of a fall. The trails at Ray Benson near Hoodoo Ski Area are perfect. That’s where I go to ski on the Pacific Crest Trail. The terrain on the south side of Santium Pass is ideal for what I’ll want and need this winter.
But balance, though. Feeling solid on classic cross-country skis (that is, scaled skis without a metal edge) is a tremendous help if you have good balance. Alpine touring skis, the narrow metal-edged ones, are perfect for someone like me, and make you feel stable overall.
You know what helps develop your balance? Yoga. A regular yoga practice has helped me stay young over the 15 years I’ve made it a part of my life. And balance is what has kept me skiing confidently in the backcountry. Do you remember when I skied part of the Continental Divide Trail in homemade shoe bindings? I had the added risk of skiing while wearing a full backpack in low-top trail shoes; my exposed ankles were the weakest part in the whole setup. I became incredibly cautious by taking safe lines, especially when I was solo.
How else do I feel fragile? There’s the head rushes, weak bones, and oh yeah, the thought that every little ache or pain could be a new tumor. There’s that.
What I mean by every pain, is every single pain. From a headache (at diagnosis, I had 27 tumors around my brain and in my skull) to shoulder and neck aches (those aches are almost constant – I live under my heating pad). Every new or recurring twinge could mean a new growth.
Why am I this touchy? Well, I attended a virtual conference for EGFR19 last weekend. EGFR19 is the lung cancer gene mutation that I have. The sessions were sobering. None of the information covered was new to me, but it was information that I hadn’t fully absorbed. The facts are that Tegresso, my daily med that targets the EGFR receptor, blocking the signaling of the gene to suppress cell growth and induce programmed cell death in cancer cells, has only been around for 10 years and has changed our survival rate drastically. Now over half of patients live for four years.
And I’m eternally grateful for that time. The med works, until it doesn’t. The med is so new, that the data is new, and we don’t know long-term survival rates…it’s anyone’s guess, but I choose to believe I’ll live longer than four years. I’ve been on it for eight months now, and it’s still working. Missy, my best friend in high school and college, was only on it for a few months when it stopped working. It chills me to be reminded of this. I’ve stayed closer to the living side of this narrow path I’m on, but find that the closer I can walk to the center… keeping in mind the fragility of it all…the more alive I feel. Everything is very simple now, and for that reason, I like it on this side of getting sick.
I repeat myself so much these days, but I do feel like shouting it from the rooftops: “It’s all going away all the time. Live now. Live hard. Go big.”
Example? Kirk and I have never really done Christmas. I might put some lights up and hang a few ornaments on one of our bigger plants, but that’s it. Oh, and maybe I’ll make some gingerbread cookies, but this year I want it. I want it all, because last Christmas is where it all went down for me.
I was visiting my parents for the holidays last year. If you remember, it was on that trip that a sports rehab and chiropractic doctor advised me to get some imaging done at an urgent care when my body wasn’t responding as expected after a few appointments with him. It was at the urgent care that we discovered my neck and spine were covered in tumors, and I was at risk of my spinal cord snapping. I was immediately taken to the hospital and had emergency surgery to cut out the tumor that had completely consumed my C4 vertebrae and pressed into my spinal cord. That gap in my spine is now a titanium screen, and I will most likely feel its unnaturalness in my body for the rest of my life.
So I’m grateful. Grateful and immediately sobered again to the real fragility of it all. My physical container could go away soon. And then?
So we are doing Christmas. This weekend, we’ll head to the deep forests along the Cascade Mountains with our tree permits and saws to find a little scamp of a tree to bring home with us. It needs to be small to fit the room, but we’ll be sure there is room for presents. We don’t usually do Christmas presents because spending the day together or having an adventure was always more important. But this year I want presents, especially ones that are wrapped up combinations of little things we already own: like a gadget with fresh batteries in it, or a silly wrapping of everyday objects.
Laughter is key to a good Christmas. We are going tree cutting with some dear friends and their Great Pyrenees puppy, Remy, this weekend. They are a silly bunch – we are a silly bunch together, and that’s why I love them so. There might, just might, be a dusting of snow. The air is cold now, so there could be a nip of spirits in someone’s pocket flask, and there will most definitely be lunch at a mountain lakeside resort. How much better could that be? Then, we’ll go home to put the tree up with lights and ornaments. My mom always gave us an ornament each year at Christmas. Oh we did it big back then. We made gingerbread houses and strung popcorn and cranberries on thread, and made paper chains to hang on the tree. Mom gave me an ornament of a little reindeer standing on a soccer ball to commemorate the years I played soccer in high school. There is a hiking related one, and a running one from when my Dad and I trained for the Chicago Marathon together. The tree decorating will be accompanied by music (I am partial to the Nutcracker Suite or the John Dever and the Muppets Christmas album) And there will be cookies. Yeah, most definitely cookies.
Then I’ll watch my favorite Christmas film: The Snowman. It’s about freedom and death. No matter how old I was when I watched it, I always felt pangs of longing and sadness at the closing credits when the boy experiences loss for the first time. Maybe I’ve always been closer to the center of the line than I knew. Living big has always been my path forward, and in that way, I haven’t changed.
I was admitted to the hospital after that urgent care visit on December 18, my mom holding my neck and C-collar steady as the ambulance raced us to the hospital. Each bump on those terrible roads sent electric shocks through my body, and we cried harder. Kirk flew in to Louisiana on the 19th, my surgery happened on the 21st, and my discharge from the hospital on the 24th. Yes, I’m gonna celebrate Christmas this year.
It’s very easy to take myself too seriously. Especially when starting something new like writing a book. After the Central Oregon Writers Guild conference last month, I was totally humbled and walked away from the weekend with my brain full of words and concepts, straining to remember what I could from college literature classes 30 years ago. It took four days and a walk in a tangerine sunrise before an inkling of confidence came back. After all, I’ve been writing constantly for those 30 years; I wasn’t starting from scratch, was I?
Then I thought about my story: the months and years of living the dirtbag hiker lifestyle, discovering my love of strangers in strange lands, and how illness changed my relationship to all of it, and hope returned. I’ve lived through so many hilarious and scary moments that I could easily write an entire book about almost dying – like the time I could have slipped down a frozen ice shoot of snow on the Continental Divide Trail when approaching Gray’s Peak in Colorado. If I can walk across that icy death trap with bald trail runners, then I can write a book, right?
What helps is knowing that I didn’t start this book process just to place a shiny cover on my bookshelf, but to live the life of a writer, and to be a student again. I love the learning, I love the challenge of trying to condense 48 years of living hard into something bite-sized. I mean, how often do we let ourselves start at something new, knowing the journey will be filled with uncertainty and stumbles? Hmmmm, kind of a thru-hike? But what is different this time is that I never questioned my ability to finish a thru-hike. Not even on that first 2,000-mile one in 2002. I knew I would do it. Why is writing a book any different? I’m in a daily wrestling match with myself…but what a luxury to have this conversation with living me, when in an alternative universe I didn’t make it? This is all a bonus. This is all the icing on top.
I was in one of those self-doubting funks when a friend sent me this interview with author Ursula LeGuin, and watching it immediately turned my attitude around.
It lit my brain on fire in a couple of different ways and really got me excited about trying my hand at fiction. There are so many takeaways from this interview, but at one point, she mentioned that you don’t want to talk to a writer at the end of the day if they haven’t been writing. Even the best of us struggle. In a workshop I attended this week with author Cheri Kephart, she rattled off a few other quotes like this one from Hemingway: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” and then I found this one from George Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” But then I stumbled upon this Emerson quote that helped: “The only way to write is to write.” True dat. This blog is helping to serve that purpose. It’s giving me something other than the obvious task at hand to have fun with. I keep a running list of things I’d like to explore, or that struck me, and have come to enjoy the cadence of writing a blog post a week, sometimes about writing, sometimes not. I think it’s the writing that is key here. Just doing it.
I’ll leave you with this song that always helps lighten the mood when I’m bogged down by gerunds or trying to wrap my head around how to use the past perfect tense.
Here is my favorite part of the song, 100% Endurance from Yard Act:
“It’s all so pointless, ah, but it’s not though is it? It’s really real and when you feel it, you can really feel it Grab somebody that you love Grab anyone who needs to hear it And shake ’em by the shoulders, scream in their face
Death is coming for us all, but not today Today you’re living it, hey, you’re really feeling it Give it everything you’ve got knowing that you can’t take it with you And all you ever needed to exist has always been within you Gimme some of that good stuff that human spirit Cut it with a hundred percent endurance.”
It’s 0-dark-30 in Pendleton. My room sits eye-level to busy Highway 84, and I try to drown out the sound of trucks breaking and cars racing through the city by turning the fan on high.
I arrived in the late afternoon and shook off the four-hour drive. A pain had just started to take hold of my lower back, but some light stretching and walking helped to ease the stiffness that had set in.
It’s time for the yearly Oregon Outdoor Recreation Summit, and arriving here brings back all sorts of memories of my body last year. What do I mean? Last year, I was in such debilitating pain, still blaming my condition on slow-healing injuries, that I was jacked up on pain meds and moved so deliberately that many people noticed something was wrong. Only weeks later would I be diagnosed with cancer, which explained the constant neck and back spasms that had been plaguing me for months.
The Summit is designed and hosted by the Oregon Trails Coalition, the group I have been leading as Chair of the Steering Committee for the last three years, and this is my final summit in this volunteer role.
That first night I stopped in distillery where about 50 other summit folks milled about. Entering this room was both exciting and daunting. Many people knew of my challenging year because I’ve been quite public about it, but others had no idea. It was as if I was breaking out of a cocoon…a cocoon that had been smashed and thought destroyed, but not. I had emerged on the other side of my brush with mortality to find myself on a similar path I had been on before. It was both exciting and confusing.
But I digress. I wanted to write this blog post to talk about volunteering and how remaining involved in the Coalition has been a vital part of my healing. My fellow board members cheered me on this year, they ran the monthly meetings until I was able to engage again, and gave me lovely gifts like home-made granola, books, and a bright yellow t-shirt that I wear constantly.
To have a purpose greater than yourself and to be of service to your community is a powerful motivator and force for healing. I was deathly ill a year ago, and now I’m walking upright. I still have the glow from the Portugal sun on my cheeks, and am reimagining my future. This summit doesn’t represent my swan song; it’s a re-awakening. It’s a rebirth. BTW, this seems an opportune time to mention Renee means “reborn” in French. How can it be the first time I’m drawing this connection?
So volunteering. Volunteering has helped pull me out of my self-focused fog. Sure, I could have dwelled on my pain, quit the Coalition, and sulked about my inability to backpack, but I decided to use what energy I had to continue supporting, promoting, and advocating for the preservation, development, and stewardship of a statewide network of trails. Using my precious hours in this world for good has always been vitally important to me. When I was faced with a million career options after college, I pushed that all away to become a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. I wanted my time to mean something to someone. I found that direct aid was the best way to disentangle myself from the rampant consumerism and individualism that modern society primes us for. Volunteering connects us to the collective, much like I believe hiking connects us to the land. And connection is healing.
My mom will be spending Thanksgiving and Christmas at a diner serving dinner to those in need. And with the SNAP benefit disaster, I expect this small act of kindness will have a dramatic impact on her community, and her outlook in the wake of my dad’s death.
Are you volunteering?
My brother has always loved animals, so I’m encouraging him to look into animal shelters in his area and explore if they need help walking dogs or petting cats. Volunteering could look like anything. You could show up for children, the elderly, the sick, or the natural areas around you. You could pull invasive weeds or plant milkweed for migrating Monarch butterflies. It’s endless! And when it feels like everything is falling apart, volunteering can connect you with the beauty of what is working, what is alive around you.
If you are in Oregon, we are in our recruitment period for the Oregon Trails Coalition Steering Committee and Advisory Board. The Advisory Council strives to be truly representative of the Oregon Trails community of professionals, advocates, volunteers, and trail users. It advises the Steering Committee on coalition advocacy positions and campaigns, and helps implement and promote events and programs. The Steering Committee provides oversight and guidance to the Coalition Director, is responsible for carrying out the Coalition’s mission, and generally acts in accordance with the Advisory Council’s recommendations.… and you get to work with fabulous people. Please join us!
I’ll leave you with this post from my friend Jess, and I’d love to hear from you. How do you volunteer? How would you like to volunteer? I bet we could connect you with a meaningful opportunity that helps you see the beauty and richness of an engaged life.
Since commenting has been so buggy on this website, I’ve decided to share these posts on Substack , where commenting will be much easier.
I flew down to see my Mom recently and got the heady experience of hanging out in the clouds for a while. The plane hit a bit of turbulence after takeoff, but that was because we entered the world of fluffy white poofs; I was glued to the window. I’m sure I’ve taken other plane rides like this one, but we kept going in and out, parting the mist and vapor, and it would all close in around us again. And always there was more floof and always more poof. It was exciting and took me back to childhood dreams of flying. You know, if I could fly like superman: point up and go up. This is what I imagined it to be.
I was torn between watching the clouds and re-reading a classic. I kept going back and forth, both were so rich and exciting that I couldn’t decide which to concentrate on. I didn’t remember 1984 as an exciting book when I read it as a high schooler. Sure, there were the main takeaways of gaslighting and control, but there was so much more in my reading this time around. Do I need to revisit all the classics that I’ve already crossed off my list? Time and experience are opening new portals into the sentences.
1984 is an amazing book to read as a study of the craft. I kept turning the pages, wanting more: the plot pulled me forward, sometimes pushing, and it was difficult to put it down to wonder at the sky that passed by my window. I want to create a work of art that compels readers along in the same way. It won’t be a world of thought police; our phones do a good enough job there now (in fact, reading about a world where thought police exist helps me find gratefulness for the freedoms and pleasures that I do have – for now). And it holds up. Wow this book holds up. So, yes, it’s time to reread everything I’ve ever read… to think that I might be capable of creating something half as beautiful is a dream. But flying through these clouds is a dream too.
Since commenting has been so buggy on this website, I’ve decided to share these posts on Substack where commenting will be much easier.Note: My substack is free, so please choose “no pledge”.
She-ra Hikes 