When I started this website almost three years ago now, I knew that I was never going to be the kind of dedicated, regular poster that some other enthusiasts who run whisky websites are. Quite a few dedicated enthusiasts post at least one or two reviews every week, and have been doing so for years (Whisky Notes being an outstanding example). That ain’t me, and it never was going to be me. But I did think I could probably manage at least a post or two every month, and sometimes more.

That hasn’t exactly worked out.

It’s hard to say exactly where things started, but in Spring 2023, I had some slightly off bloodwork followed by a succession of viral illnesses. That fall, I was diagnosed with an abscess that required surgical drainage, the first of what ended up being (so far) three colorectal surgeries. Just when I started thinking I was fully on the mend from the most recent colorectal surgery, I had an extremely strong reaction to a combined Covid/Flu vaccine, and my doctor ordered bloodwork to check for possible autoimmune issues. The autoimmune markers came back fine, but the CBC showed pancytopenia (low cell counts) across the board along with abnormal cell morphologies. A repeat several weeks later showed similar issues and earned me a referral to hematology, an eventual bone marrow aspiration and biopsy, many, many blood draws, and an eventual diagnosis of hairy cell leukemia.

As far as hematologic malignancies go, hairy cell leukemia is a nice, gentle one–it’s an indolent cancer and although it’s not technically curable, it’s extremely responsive to treatments, most of which have a high probability of producing lasting remissions. It’s not very much like nasty, aggressive leukemias like acute lymphoblastic leukemia or acute myeloid leukemia. But it’s still leukemia, and dealing with the immense stress of finding out what was wrong in the first place (first weird CBC was in early February, and I wasn’t definitively diagnosed until the end of June), plus the gradual unfolding of the complications of treatment and the radical lifestyle adjustments that come with treatment has been quite dizzying. Devoting time to this site has fallen very much by the wayside. Further, my hematologist initially thought alcohol might be solely responsible for my marrow suppression, and I spent a lot of time abstaining on doctor’s orders even prior to starting treatment. Now that I’m in the midst of treatment, drinking is absolutely out of the question, so cracking open new whiskies or revisiting old ones isn’t something I can do at the moment.

On the other hand, I have an extensive archive of older tasting notes that I haven’t published. I’m taking the Fall semester off from my graduate program. Because treatment for blood cancer does a number on immune function (chemotherapy, which I finished a month ago, is a wrecking ball; monoclonal antibodies, the current stage of my treatment, do subtler damage), I can’t really go out to restaurants or the gym. So, one thing I can do is scrape my archive and post older reviews! For now, at least, things have started to stabilize a bit, and I’ve (with some difficulty) adjusted to the new normal of dealing with a very slow progress of going through treatment and working toward normal immune function and something like normal life over the course of the next year. As long as I don’t get hit with any fresh shocks, I should be able to do a somewhat better job of keeping up with the site and maybe around December or so, if all goes well, I can gradually reintroduce a bit of alcohol here and there and actually review some new stuff.

Hope those of you reading this are enjoying better health than I have been lately!