Soundtrack to the Happiest and Scariest Chapter of My Life

I was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma in February 2009. Before the disease was diagnosed, my wife was frantically reviewing the symptoms. Syphilis or Cancer. I've never hoped for Syphilis so much in my life. Biopsy confirmed it and a port was installed. It all felt very cyborg-like having that specialized tube running to my heart to deliver the massive amounts of ABVD Chemo drugs every other week.

During this 6 month period, I planned for my life, not my death. My wife and I agreed to take our boat from Nashville, TN to Abaco, Bahamas (Hopetown in particular) and live there for a year. We took it down the Tenn-Tom Waterway to Mobile, cruised down the west coast of Florida, to the Keys, then to Lauderdale and finally crossed the Gulf Stream to Elbow Cay where we fell in love with the people and the pace of island living.

Both of our children attended school on the island and, while our daughter (15) wasn't happy about being there, I'm pretty sure 15 year old girls aren't happy about much of anything regardless of their location. Our son attended a classroom with first and second graders in a quaint little school where parents had rolling lunch duty and kids played outside and ate lunch outside.

I learned tons about boating, fishing, lobster (dey call 'em crawfish) spearing, gathering conch to make scorch (basically a conch salad). A typical Sunday involved taking boats to a small spit of an island like parrot cay, diving for conch and fixing a scorch with ingredients supplied by everyone. Mind the bird pepper!

Rewind back to early 2009. After diagnosed, I was watching either the beginning or the end of Entourage, the HBO series. This song came on called If I Ever Feel Better by Phoenix.

It was perfect timing. Both the cadence and the words rang true. This song in some strange magical way inspired me to suggest the idea to my wife who wholeheartedly agreed to pull up our lives and run at the world. Eventually, I took the various video clips and put them into a somewhat haphazard account of our trip. Hope you enjoy the video and I really hope that if you've never heard of Phoenix, you listen to more because they just have such a nice steady chill groove to them.