The Lesters

You may have heard the news by now: Jon Lester, Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma survivor, pitches a no-hitter, and about a week later, he reveals that his father was diagnosed with NHL about a month ago.

Very sad. The younger Lester apparently had a form of NHL called anaplastic large cell lymphoma. It's fairly rare, and fairly aggressive. He seems to have had appropriately aggressive chemotherapy.

His father, on the other hand, has an indolent type -- slow growing, possibly Follicular NHL (the most common indolent type). He's in the middle of chemo treatments now. Interesting to think about the course of treatment he is going with, considering it's indolent. Seems like fairly heavy chemo, from what I've read. My guess is that it was diagnosed at stage 4 -- maybe had traveled to an organ, or he had some bone marrow involvement. (I'm at stage 3, in case you needed the reminder.) Sounds like he's doing well, though, which is great. I wish him luck.

The Boston Globe ran a nice story Sunday about Jon Lester and the poise he exhibits, on the mound and in life. Apparently, the story about his dad's NHL broke when he was interviewed on ESPN. The story from ESPN.com has a film clip from the interview.

I think the really interesting part about it all is his father's desire to tell people, given what I wrote recently about "not knowing":

Father and son had debated whether or not to talk publicly about his dad's condition. John Lester wanted his son to get it off his chest.
"He's telling everyone ... like he won a prize," Jon Lester said. "It makes him feel better to sit there and talk about it. He can tell people, you know what, I have cancer, I'm doing great, everything is going to be good and people look at him like he's crazy."

I hear ya, buddy.

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In other Red Sox news: Even I'm not a big enough Sox fan to have my baby baptized at Fenway.

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We had a great trip to Maryland this weekend, to see our niece Amy graduate from the University of Maryland. Actually, we didn't see her graduate, we just showed up for the party. But it was a fun time, and we're very proud of our UMd grad.

Amy, now that you'll be able to afford better beer, and you'll be too exhausted to get up off the couch at the end of the day, you'll appreciate this cool invention.

And I'm sure you'll agree it is about the only decent thing to ever come out of Duke.

Go Terps!