Riding for Roses

I had the opportunity to chat with former Mayor of Austin Kirk Watson for a few minutes. We talked about Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, Kirk’s experience with cancer, and the Tour Watch 2005 event. Kirk has some great advice for people living with cancer as a survivor or caregiver. You can listen to Conversation with Rob: Kirk Watson or subscribe to my podcast RSS feed to listen to all of my podcasts.

Today the Discovery Network Travel Channel is leaving Austin. They are creating a TV show about Lance Armstrong fans. They’ve been in Austin taping since Monday night and they’ve spent some of that time following me and my family around, doing some interviews, and capturing our lives both as Lance fans and a family dealing with childhood leukemia. It has been an interesting week of mostly fun and only minor inconvenience. I am looking forward to seeing the show on the Travel Channel, tentatively in September.

Today was stage 1 at the Tour Watch 2005 event at Central Market North in Austin. Being the first day of the event, we didn’t really know how it was going to go until it happened. It was a great day of conversation with visitors to the Tour Watch and other event participants. We raised a little money and hope we will keep building momentum.

Spencer was in at the oncologist today with our Discovery Network entourage to tape some of it. Unfortunately, his complete blood count was not everything we hoped. His absolute neutrophil count is 300 which qualifies as severe neutropenia, and means he is at high risk for a bacterial infection. We are going to go ahead and have him attend the first day of Tour Watch but we’ll have to keep him home at least until July 8 and maybe another week. In order to attend the Tour Watch, we have anti-bacterial precautions in place