7 - 16 February 2026
I am temporarily leaving our voyage to return home to Colorado for surgery. Leaving today and rejoining the voyage in Kenya in 10 days’ time. Sadly, 3 of those days will be spent on airplanes!
On Dec. 15 at my routine 6-month skin check, my doctor found a weird spot on my back that concerned him. He took a biopsy and sent it off to the pathology/cytology lab. Unfortunately, with the holidays, nobody analyzed it for more than two weeks. I called and called, but the analysis was not available. We flew to Thailand on Dec. 27 and arrived on Dec. 29.
On Jan. 1 (Dec. 31 in Colorado), I received an email that the biopsy results had come back positive for melanoma. It’s just superficial, stage 0, “melanoma in situ.” Prognosis is excellent as the cancer hasn’t even begun penetrating the outer layer of skin. It’s entirely possible (but unknowable) that the biopsy has completely eliminated the melanoma.
It’s imperative that I get a large area around the original biopsy surgically excised down to the muscle fascia. This is not Mohs surgery: it’s much wider and deeper, and the lab work will take days after they close me up. If the lab work doesn’t show completely clear margins, they will have to operate again.
My doc back home said he wanted me to get surgery by mid-February. We boarded our ship on Jan. 2. I worked with the ship’s physician to explore options for getting the cancer treated in one of our ports of call in Southeast Asia.
She was very optimistic that I could get it done in Penang, Malaysia, a big city with world-class hospitals where English is an official language. The language thing is a big deal because the US docs need a detailed pathology/cytology report that they can use to manage follow-up treatment after I get back in the spring.
There’s a big medical consulting company called AXA that is contracted by Semester at Sea to match passengers to medical care in the countries I visit. They specialize in finding providers, contracting for service, scheduling care, and managing the international medical insurance.
AXA was a complete and total failure. We sent them my passport, visas, medical records, and pathology reports, and photos of the cancer. We gave them the dates during which I needed to schedule the procedure in Penang. I was in touch with them every day for three weeks while we visited Thailand and Vietnam and spent many, many days at sea with very little internet access.
Right before we left Vietnam, and less than a week before my target surgical date in Malaysia, AXA emailed me to say they still couldn’t find a surgeon who could see me in Ho Chi Minh City! Furthermore, they noticed on my itinerary that our ship departed Ho Chi Minh the next day, and they were concerned that Ho Chi Minh would not work. Which is bizarre because for three weeks I’d been telling them over and over that I needed a surgeon in Penang!
Seeing the increasingly ridiculous emails back and forth between me and AXA, the physician on our ship said she’d completely lost confidence in AXA. She said even if they were able to book a last-minute skin surgery in Penang, she wouldn’t be surprised if they sent me to a medical-tourist face-lift place. She said if she were in my situation, she’d just fly home and get treated by my own doctor.
So that’s what I’m doing.
Today I fly 5 hours from Kochi, Kerala, India, to Doha, Qatar, on the Persian Gulf. Then I have a 7-hour layover and depart in the wee hours for a 17-hour flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. After another layover, I’ll fly to Denver, arriving there at noon Sunday. More than 32 hours gate to gate from India to Denver. My son Nate will pick me up at the airport and drive me to Fort Collins, where I will be exhausted and 12.5 hours jet-lagged.
My surgery is Monday morning. I have to wait a few days to get the lab results and make sure they got it all. Then Nate and I will fly together to Kenya next Sunday, Feb. 16, to join our FoCo SAS friends on a 6-day safari trip. Nate departs for home, and I return to the ship on Feb. 23.
On a positive note, I need to have my skin checked every 3 months for the rest of my life, so it’s good that the same guy is doing the surgery. Makes my ongoing care more consistent.
Also, it’ll be great to visit our dog Pearl and some of my friends back home for a week. Finally, I forgot a few items at home back at Christmas time, so I can retrieve them! In fact, I have a big list of stuff to bring back to the ship for Jennifer and others.
It’s a bummer to miss out on all the amazing activities we’d planned in India and to miss the next leg of the voyage to Kenya. Not wild about spending nearly 3 days on airplanes in the next 10 days. But it’s just got to be done, so I’m doing it.
I have once again gotten way behind in posting and photodumping about Borneo, adventures at sea, and the amazing culture and landscape of Kerala. Hopefully, I can use my long plane flights and recovery time to write about all that. Expect some delayed posts over the next week or so.
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