12 Cities, 1 Year is going on hold

Hello, faithful readers. I’ve got some serious and bad news to share. While in Denver last week, Beth had some medical tests on a strange lump that’s appeared in her armpit over the past couple months. We learned on Monday that she has cancer. So, we are immediately returning to Denver, so she can have more tests, treatment, and recovery. Because of this, the 12 Cities, 1 Year project is going on hiatus.

We don’t yet know very much about the extent of the disease. All we know is Beth has a growth in the lymph nodes under her arm, and that it’s metastatic, meaning that the cancer started somewhere else (breast, perhaps) and then spread there. We don’t know where it started yet or how advanced it is. All we know is she needs tests to determine those things, then surgery, and then probably chemo and/or radiation. We’ll learn more starting next week.

Obviously we can’t deal with these things very well on the road or living in a new city every month. Since Denver is where we both have the biggest support network, we’re going back there, probably for several months, if not longer. We both hope that after Beth is back to good health, we’ll be able to continue our location independent lifestyle. I personally don’t think we lived as digital nomads long enough to really get used to it or learn how well it would work long-term for us.

We lived in four cities, and learned something new in each one. Maybe someday in the future we can just pick up where we left off, and go to the remaining eight cities we originally planned. Or maybe we’ll choose another eight. Who knows; we’ll figure that out later, after we deal with much bigger and more urgent matters.

We still have a few videos, blog articles, and photos queued up to post on this blog. So we’ll do that as we have time. And I’m sure we’ll post a few reflections and lessons learned from the project so far. But then this blog site (and our associated Facebook page) will take a slumber for a while. Instead, we’ll go back to posting things at Beth at Home and Abroad and Todd Bradley’s Galaxy, and on our two individual Facebook pages.

17 comments

  1. Thanks, everyone. One of the strange things about this is that Beth isn’t in any pain, and looks and feels and acts like she always has. She doesn’t appear to be sick in the slightest, so whatever is going on inside her, its being very stealthy about it.

  2. Todd and Beth, we here are speechless. Jessica called this morning and asked what is going on. I am very glad she did, or I would still be as clueless as I was before her call. I can not tell you both how sorry I am about this bump in your highway! Sending you the best “vibes” possible!

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