This is the end for our blog and it will probably be the worst post you have seen, because I’ve lost my editor. Leslie, my long-time traveling partner and my beautiful wife of 31 years, died Wednesday, March 20, of metastatic endometrial cancer at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville. The cancer came back, and it came back in a big and awful way.
Since returning to our home in Mexico in early January she had been growing stronger, hitting the gym four days a week to walk on a treadmill for 30 minutes. Then around February 20, she developed diarrhea. It got better, then came back. Then she started wheezing and had shortness of breath, as well as pain in the upper right quadrant of her abdomen, mostly after eating.
She was scheduled for her first three-month checkup at Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida, during the first week in March, and had several other appointments set up during that week, including with a primary care physician. But that doctor was ill and cancelled Leslie’s Monday appointment, so we went to the emergency room for the symptoms mentioned above as well as a distended belly. Doctors did a CT scan and diagnosed her with pneumonia and a large hematoma on her liver. They were stunningly wrong. And they did absolutely nothing to treat her.
Rather than go home at the end of the week we flew to Nashville, where Leslie planned to have all her future checkups. She saw a nurse practitioner in gynecology/oncology at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, part of Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The NP sent Leslie to the ER, where she got another CT scan. This one showed lesions in her abdomen, and the Vanderbilt doctors feared there was a mass on her liver instead of a hematoma. A day later, a PET scan confirmed a large, fast-growing tumor on her liver that was pushing upward on her lung, which caused the wheezing. There was also a buildup of fluid filled with “innumerable” malignant ascites. The doctor said this was like someone had thrown rice into Leslie’s abdomen and each grain was expanding.
Doctors were encouraged by a mutation in the tumor. They hoped immunotherapy might help shrink the tumor and buy Leslie some time. But she never made it to the first infusion. Early that Wednesday morning she slipped away peacefully in her sleep. Stephanie and I were by her side. We are heartbroken. Everything happened so quickly. In just three months, she went from being “in remission” to being a victim of a highly aggressive cancer.
We are grateful for the care Leslie received from the team at Vanderbilt. If you would like to honor Leslie, please feel free to click on this link: https://give.vanderbilthealth.org/give/246900/#!/donation/checkout Under the question “What would you like your donation to support?” please select “Greatest needs at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.”
The family held a party for Leslie on Tuesday, March 26, at Stephanie’s home in Nashville. Many of Steph’s friends and co-workers came. We ate food and drank wine. When I told some of Leslie’s friends we were doing that, three of them said, “Yep, that’s Leslie. She would love it.”
According to her wishes, we will be holding a slightly more formal Celebration of Life for Leslie in early May at our home in Ajijic. Our dear friend and retired United Methodist pastor Michelle will officiate.
It’s going to take me a long time to learn how to travel without Leslie by my side — if I’m able to do that. So I am closing out this travel blog. I will leave everything up for the rest of 2024, and if anything exciting happens I will post again. But I believe this is the end. Thank you for following us over the past eight years. Adios!
Ex-pats in Mexico 