I put this blog and website aside after I was diagnosed with advanced fallopian tube cancer in December 2016. After years of travel blogging and bike travel and taking photos and dabbling with publishing articles and even daring to start a book about being diagnosed with my first cancer – lobular breast cancer.

Essentially, the story changed. Again.

A few months ago in the fall of 2020 I was pondering what to do with with this website and blog. Should I just take it down? Erase these words and memories and images? The voice in these posts – my voice – strikes me as a little naive now. A window into a more carefree time imagining reinventing a life with new possibilities.

This blog is essentially a living timeline where I can read my own dreams and goals and watch them evolve. I can follow my own journey from a bike trip through India in 2011 where I was fit and strong and fearless and excited to do more adventures and writing. I read the transition from being diagnosed with breast cancer 6 months later and in treatment for almost a year. I remember clawing back from that illness, determined to reclaim my ability to do everything I had done before and regain what I had lost before cancer … and Italy was where that happened.

I ultimately decided, no. I’m not ready to erase this voice and these memories yet. Though they feel so far removed from who I am today – four years later.

Because while my life took a very unexpected turn at the end of 2016 with a second and incurable cancer diagnosis, in many ways it took a turn that doubled-down on the essence of who I am.

I read some of these posts now – over four years since my last entry – with pleasure and a little sadness and some amusement.

And I’ve decided to open the window of this website again, probably with less caution about telling the cancer story, and see what happens. Thanks for joining.