2022 Annual Letter from Mike and Michele
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from the Bennetts. I am starting the 2022 annual letter with the news that I have no big news to share. I think that’s enough to crown this is A Very Good Year. As announced in the 2021 edition, I was diagnosed with breast cancer on 12/6/21. From 1/6/22 to 6/8/22 I did 18 rounds of chemotherapy, and in August had my last two surgeries, completing my active treatment phase. Now I just live life, get screened every now and then, and ms. tumor is not invited into my life ever again. Door is closed and locked, key is lost, cancer has no place in this body.
It was a year full of love and support from friends and family. January of 2022 Mike’s grandma Jane stayed with us in Portland, and we had a grand time watching reality TV and gossiping. My parents rented an apartment in Portland and hung out with me loads and loads and kept me company during treatments. Mike set up a meal train and l learned that our friends are much better cooks than us.
Mike and I both came up with ways to make our lives fun during treatments. My hair started to detach in late January, and I learned how to wear wigs and draw on eyebrows. I shared all about my story online, and it helped me handle the ups and downs of treatment. We loved our previous van trips so much that we bought our own pop-top camper van from Peace Vans in Seattle in February, and took it on some really nice short escapes in between treatments. I continued to swim and competed with my duet partner Jen at the International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics Championships in Palm Springs in April. It felt like such a huge accomplishment to be able to swim that routine while in treatment. I had weekly zoom chats with my Aunt Carmen y practicamos español, y nos divertimos mucho.
In between it all we both kept working. I helped 13 clients buy and sell homes in 2022, one more than last year despite my cancer treatments. Mike continued to push the envelope with bigger and bigger projects. He created Dinolandia: an immersive dinosaur museum in the former Banana Republic building in downtown Portland, Wonderwood and Wonderwood Springs: a role play game adventure themed walkthrough in St Johns along with matching cafe, and Snow Day: a winter pop-up holiday store also downtown. Let’s just say his art career kept him busy in 2022.
We can never stop working on the house, and this year we decided to hire Nial our neighbor to revamp Mike’s former studio - our garage - into a craft/workspace for both of us. Its still a work in progess - maybe that’s for the 2023 newsletter.
And like always we somehow managed to fit travel into our year. Besides the van trips I went to New England with my synchro team for our national competition in October, and Mike met me in his hometown to accept a distinguished alumni award. We spent a week with my parents in Hawaii, and traveled to Mexico City with college friends for a friend’s wedding, and on to the Yucatan for a week just the two of us.
This feels crazy to write, but when I sat down to type up this letter, asking Mike out loud ‘what did we even do this year??’ cancer treatment was not the first thing to come to mind. Honestly, my first thought was ‘did I just hug cats all year?*’ and when I told myself, ‘no, you did lots of things,’ the second and third things I thought of were ‘oh yeah, you went to Mexico,’ and ‘you bought a van, silly!’ not ‘dude you did 18 rounds of chemo.’ So that’s my closing thought for 2022. We did lots of thing, chemo was just one of them, and really not the most exciting one either. Not even as exciting as the time I wasted on TikTok.
Love you and Happy New Year,
Michele + Mike
*yes I did just hug cats all year.