Ugh… this was waiting for me as a draft… I wrote this up on the fight home and never got around to posting it!

The 19th annual Thyroid Cancer Survivors Conference was held in Los Angeles this year last weekend. Another amazing 3.5 days of education, questions, answers, story telling, laughter, crying, and best of all, friendship.

These fellow survivors and I are all linked together, our journeys may be different, but we’re all here for the same reason. We have Thyroid Cancer. It’s an incredible family of people from so many different walks of life.  I wish I could spend more time with those that aren’t local.

I been fortunate to get to know some more amazing people this year as well as reconnecting with those from last year. It’s unfortunate that I likely only see these people once a year. Perhaps I need to travel a bit more!

One session that really got my mind running is fundraising for research. Around 94% (I think) of ThyCa.org’s proceeds goes to research and their other programs. That’s amazing, these people are doing a lot of good things and they need more resources to do even more bigger and better things. I need to reach out to people and ask for donations whether monetary, products, goods, items for the annual auction, etc. That project is going to be weighing in my mind from here on out. If you have any interest in helping, please, please, please reach out to me.  The conference is in Baltimore next year and I’m sure we can make it the biggest one ever. We should be able to eclipse the $50k in donations that were raised at the conference this year.

Outside of the conference I was able to spend some time with family and friends from Simi Valley to San Diego to Laguna Beach. I didn’t do nearly the amount of driving that I did when I went to Utah, but it was still a great time. I fed Ostriches and Emus, had a turkey untie my shoe, ate at the amazing Summerlind Cafe, ate at a restaurant/tavern that’s been around since 1865 and allegedly the first place in the world to serve ranch dressing. Not sure how true that is, but they did have some good food and amazing bread! I lost at several games of Skip-Bo. I still think that game is rigged…

Decided against paying $15 to park at a beach or Crystal Cove state park.  Not for the brief amount of time I was going to spend there.  That’s crazy.

I stopped by several Nike outlets and didn’t buy a thing!