I Apologize

To everyone who has tried to contact me through this website over the past year, I apologize. To everyone who has been patiently waiting for the next book in the Strongbow Saga—waiting far, far too long–I apologize. For the past several years, life has just kept hitting my wife Jeanette and me with one damn thing after another. Over the past several years, we have been too often struggling with health issues which, while none have been potentially fatal, have just knocked us back hard time after time. So bottom line, I do not know when I will finish book 5. I have not had the emotional energy to work on it for the past year, or even to check my website for the past year. I have not given up on finishing Halfdan’s story in the Strongbow Saga. Hopefully that will happen, but as of today I cannot tell you when.

That answers what so many have been asking, and again, I apologize for not getting to this website so I could respond to you. Feel free to stop reading here, but for anyone who wonders what the hell has been going on, here is a quick summary.

The current string of health issues began in late 2023, when I began having chronic, daily diarrhea (and sorry if that is too much information). But the underlying problem would not get diagnosed and treated until September of 2024, because another, more serious health problem intervened and took precedence. My normal heart rate is around 65 beats per minute. One morning, in  January 2024, I woke up with my heart hammering at over 130 beats per minute. After 19 hours in our local hospital’s emergency department, which was horribly overcrowded that day, I was diagnosed with atrial flutter, a type of irregular heartbeat. The ER docs gave me medication that slowed my heart rate back to near normal, started me on a powerful blood thinner, because irregular heartbeat can cause blood clots to form, which can cause strokes or heart attacks, and referred me to a cardiologist.

Seeing a specialist, at least in the area where we live, almost always takes considerable time. In March, the cardiologist tried to correct the heartbeat with a procedure called cardioversion, which basically involves sedating the patient and giving them a strong electric shock to try and jolt the heartbeat back to normal. That worked, but lasted for all of 24 hours, so my cardiologist then referred me to another cardiologist in the same practice, who specialized in a type of surgical procedure called an ablation.

To give some background context to this, while the atrial fib was active, which ran from January through most of May, I had very low energy and would get out of breath with minimal exertion, so Jeanette and I struggled to deal with the amount of daily work our small farm lifestyle requires.

In May of 2024, the second cardiologist performed the ablation. He made incisions in my groin on either side, and from there into the large veins coming up out of each leg.  He fed a catheter into each vein, and snaked them up into my heart on either side. Then, with some kind of electrical tools which he fed into my heart through the catheters, he mapped the electrical rhythms of my heart muscle’s contractions, including where the electrical impulses triggering the irregular heartbeat were moving through the heart muscle. Using that information, he basically killed a section of the heart muscle to break the circuit triggering the atrial fibrillation, which allowed my heart to regain its normal rhythm.

After five months of the irregular heartbeat, it took several months to regain a normal level of stamina and energy, so Jeanette and I were still struggling to keep up with life’s demands. Also, for safety purposes, the cardiologist kept me on the strong blood thinner through July. All of this time, I was still, every day, having the severe, chronic diarrhea. I needed to have a colonoscopy to try to diagnose the cause, but that procedure could not be done while I was on the blood thinner, or, out of an abundance of caution, for several months afterwards.

I finally had the colonoscopy in September, and through that procedure and the biopsy of some tissue taken during it, I was diagnosed with colitis, an inflammation of the lining of the large intestine. I was put on a two-and-a-half-month course of steroids, which eventually cleared up the diarrhea. By then, we were nearing the end of 2024.

2025 would unfortunately end up being Jeanette’s year. She was diagnosed with skin cancer on her nose in late 2024, and had Mohs surgery to trace it all down and remove it in early 2025. After that, we were working at getting our lives back to normal, but then in the summer she got a compression fracture in one of the vertebrae of her spine. There is not much way to treat a compression fracture, other than managing the pain. The bone just gets sort of crushed, squeezing the vertebrae out of its normal shape. She dealt with about ten weeks of significant pain, during which she had to be very careful about how she moved, what she lifted, etc. Eventually the bone healed, to the extent it became solid again, easing the pain, but the vertebrae will never regain its normal shape, so she still is prone to nerve pinch type numbness and pain in her legs at times. So, 2025 was another year of just struggling with daily life and its demands, plus we had to deal with the loss of our beloved dog, and the very time-consuming but mostly joyful fact of a new border collie puppy, who is now 15 months old. Our new Sigrid is smart as a whip but very much still a toddler, and keeps us laughing, which is very, very welcome in these dark times we are all living in.

We resolved, at the start of this year, to try to pare back what we try to do on our farm, to accept that aging brings limitations, because the years have been taking a toll on us physically. I was 60 when we moved here, and am 74 now. There has been a lot of wear and tear over that 14 years.

And we resolved to regain a stronger level of physical fitness, closer to what we had before this all began. For almost five months, we have been taking long, strenuous hikes in the hills above our farm three times per week. But about a month ago something happened in both of my ankles—it is still not clear if it is arthritis, tendonitis, a combination of both, or something else altogether; the doctor is still trying to figure that out, but there have been many days where I can barely hobble to the barn and back. On top of that, my Multiple Sclerosis has flared up, causing me to feel quite ill on the days when it’s active. We’re currently waiting on tests to find out what’s happening there. Then, this past Sunday, we spent the afternoon in the ER, because Jeanette was having what turned out to be a gall bladder attack, and the ER docs determined that she has gallstones. We do not yet know what the ramifications of this will turn out to be.

As I said at the beginning of this, it has been one damn thing after another. But Jeanette and I rejoice every day in the fact that we are together, and can share every day together in this beautiful place where we live. And my thanks to all of you who have written and shown that you care.