Update No. 1: Week 2

RALEIGH, N.C. -- I just spent probably two full minutes trying to put a title up there. That's a good sign that you should just hit the tab key and start writing. So I will.

It's been two weeks of bullshit and bliss, two weeks of heart-warming and heart-pounding. Two weeks of wonder and two weeks of fear.

Each week was highly emotionally charged, for completely different reasons. At some point soon, I'll write about each.

I'm going to write about them in reverse, and separately.

The thing which I kind of glossed over earlier for Week 2 was this:

My father was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had surgery Aug. 2.

Right now, all is as well as it can be. The upsides are that he's relatively young (57) and it was found relatively earlier. The downside is that he's profoundly disabled as a result of a 1987 car accident, and that adds a serious level of complication to, well, everything. Oddly, even that has an upside; because of his disability, they were able to remove more of the parts that might be cancerous because they didn't have to worry about his future mobility; to put it simply, they could safely remove more of him and leave more of him disassembled 'cause he wasn't using it anyway. Or something like that.

We await results of testing to determine whether the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes. Those results were supposed to be available Monday. We're still waiting.

The rest of the family is waiting back in Anytown; The Wife and our kids wait in Florida, and I wait in North Carolina this week and Iowa next week.

The Wife, the Mini-Humans and I arrived home from Colorado in the single-digit hours of July 31. In the single-digit hours of Aug. 1, we had deposited the kids with a friend and were on another plane to Missouri. I've driven nearly 2,000 miles in the last 20 days, none of which were in my car.

I don't know how everything is going to turn out, but I have no reason to believe it'll be anything other than OK. We're survivors; my dad and his brothers have cheated death in some highly creative and stunning ways, and my dad's parents lived way longer than any actuarial tables would have expected them to. So we wait, and try to keep the worry to a minimum as things move on.

But I can tell you this: I've never wanted to go home more than I do right at this very second. Never.

I'll go back and write that head now, and do Week 1 later. Something tells me I should be sleeping now.