DOWN AND OUT ON ISLAND TIME

A preexisting condition leads to a rapidly advancing infection in the Bahamas Out Islands-and a sudden change of cruising plans.

-  TIM MURPHY 

In my mind, a two-line power-pop lyric from the Hold Steady's 2006 album Boys and Girls in America -"It started recreational, ended kind of medical" played and replayed in an unbroken loop through several of the eight days that I lay confined in a bed at Doc

I should say right up front that I have a preexisting condition. In June 2019, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. After chemotherapy, then surgery, then more chemotherapy, my team of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital ticked the box that said cured.” As part of the operation, my surgeon removed 47 lymph nodes from the lower right tors Hospital, Nassau, Bahamas. side of my torso. When the results came in, we cheered for the complete absence of any indication that the malignancy had migrated.

Yet the removal of those lymph nodes left a vulnerability in my otherwise robust immune system that would come back to haunt me—and haunt my partner, Lesley Davison, too.

But that would all come later.

Lesley and I bought Billy Pilgrim, our 1988 Passport 40, in fall 2017, with a plan to sail the boat north from Florida in the spring and summer, complete a refit at Maine Yacht Center in Portland, and then go voyaging, possibly even trans-Atlantic. During winter 2019, we got a good jump on the refi t project (see “Billy Pilgrim’s Progress,” CW, November/December 2020), but my cancer diagnosis, and then the world’s COVID-19 diagnosis, set us back two seasons. In September 2021, we finally set off (see “Ready or Not, Sailing Billy Pilgrim South,” CW, September), and only in early February 2022, after we crossed the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas, did we finally ease into our own good cruising groove.