I have been quiet on this blog for five weeks.
Not because nothing has happened. The labs kept running on schedule. The blood draws, the clinic visits, the numbers accumulating in MyChart the way they always do — methodically, without editorial comment, indifferent to how I feel about them.
I have been quiet because I made a deliberate decision to stop dividing my attention and spend a concentrated period finishing the manuscript.
The manuscript
Twenty years ago, I had an idea for a book.
That is not an unusual sentence for a person to say. Most ideas for books stay exactly that — ideas. They live comfortably in the back of the mind, requiring nothing, promising everything, never forced to prove themselves against the actual difficulty of sustained narrative construction.
This one didn’t stay there.
Throne Keepers: The Storm Protocol is a literary espionage novel set in Nassau, Bahamas, in August 1942. It follows Major Alec Harrow, a British intelligence officer sent to protect the Duke of Windsor — the former King Edward VIII — from a German extraction attempt. Harrow carries a sealed envelope called the Storm Protocol: written authorization to kill the Duke rather than allow his capture. The novel is less about action than about the weight of that document, and what it costs a man to carry it.
The manuscript is now at Draft 24. Approximately 64,400 words across 39 chapters. Complete structure, locked draft, and a set of clearly diagnosed revision priorities for the next pass. It is with beta readers.
For those unfamiliar with how novel drafting works: this is the stage where the scaffolding comes down, and the real editorial work begins. The bones are sound. What remains is to make every scene earn its place.
That sentence — make every scene earn its place — took me twenty years to be in a position to write.
I want to be honest about why the urgency is real without sounding melodramatic. I am palliative. The trial is doing what it can. The goal is longevity and quality, not cure, and I have made my peace with that framing — or at least I have learned to function inside it. But the publishing timeline is what it is, and I understand it clearly. A polished manuscript that attracts an agent takes time. An agent finding a publisher takes more. A publisher slotting a book into their release schedule takes more still. The entire chain, from where I stand today, runs two to three years on the optimistic end.
I am not writing about this to invite pity. I am writing about it because the timeline is a fact, and I have always used this space to deal in facts.
Throne Keepers is the legacy project. The one that existed before the diagnosis and has taken on a different weight since. Getting it finished, properly finished — not just complete but good — matters to me more than almost anything else I am doing right now. It is the thing I am building that will outlast the biology.
What the numbers say
Since the last post in March, the blood work has continued, and the picture has evolved.
The markers that track disease activity have continued moving in the same direction. CEA — the tumour marker that has been the most consistent indicator of what the disease is doing — was 157.9 on April 1 and 166.4 on April 15. It was 58.7 when this trial began in November. That trajectory is not ambiguous and I will not pretend otherwise.
CA 19-9, a secondary marker, has moved from 38 to 53 over the same period.
I want to be precise about what these numbers mean and what they do not mean.
They mean the disease is active. They mean that the tumour burden, whatever the imaging shows or doesn’t show at any given scan, is generating enough biological activity to consistently move these numbers upward. They do not tell me how I will feel tomorrow, or next month, or what the next CT will say. Markers and imaging do not always move in lockstep. I have seen that already in my own data — the scan that said stable while the CEA climbed, the reassurance that came from a picture while a number kept moving.
The liver function markers tell a different story. Bilirubin, ALT, AST, albumin, and INR — these are the tests that would show the liver struggling under the load of four metastatic deposits. They are all normal. Albumin, which is a proxy for the liver’s ability to do its job, was 40 g/L on April 15. Low end of normal, a number I am watching, but normal. The liver is still working.
The CBC — the complete blood count — has developed a trend worth naming. Hemoglobin has dropped from 166 in November to 138 on April 15. RDW, a measure of red blood cell variability, has climbed into the high range over the same period. Chemo does this. It is expected. It is also real, and I have responded by returning to the activity level I maintained in November, when the numbers were better — 20,000 steps minimum daily, gym twice a week, and sauna sessions back in rotation. The logic is simple: the body I had in November handled this disease better than the body I’ve had recently. I am trying to rebuild toward that baseline.
I will have a follow-up appointment on April 29.
What legacy actually requires
I used to think legacy was about the final product. The book on the shelf, the photograph in a collection, the thing that exists after you are gone and carries your name.
I still think the product matters. Draft 24 with beta readers is not an accident — it is the result of thousands of hours of actual work, and the work is what produces the thing worth leaving behind.
But the process has taught me something the product alone cannot teach.
Legacy is built in the doing, not the done.
Every draft was the work. Every revision that made the argument clearer, the character more honest, the structure more coherent — that was the work, and the work was the point. The book that gets published, if it gets published, will be the record of that work. But the work itself — the twenty years of returning to an idea and taking it seriously — that already happened. That is already real.
I think about this in the context of this blog, too.
TMI exists because I made a decision, in the early weeks after the diagnosis, that I was going to document this honestly. Not as a performance of courage. Not as inspirational content. As a record. A way of thinking out loud about what it actually means to navigate a terminal diagnosis with some degree of intentionality.
I do not know who reads this. I know some of you, from the comments and messages. I know you are more than I expected. And I know that some of you are going through something similar — in your own body, or alongside someone in theirs — and that the precision of this blog matters to you for the same reason it matters to me. Because precise language about hard things is not cold. It is, in fact, the most respectful thing I know how to offer.
The manuscript is the legacy project I chose twenty years ago.
This blog is the one the diagnosis chose for me.
I am doing both as best I can on whatever timeline remains.
That is enough.