Okay, so let's start with my day today. This is Mercy Hospital's Heart and Vascular Center, the place where Brad and I spent a good part of our day today.

It took my mother-in-law's doctors six months to finally decide that her chest pains warranted an angiogram. In fact, they had instead prescribed an anti-anxiety medication, which she was taking for the last six weeks with no improvement. Without going into the medical details, she was on the verge of a probably catastrophic heart attack. One emergency double bypass surgery later, and the prognosis is very good.

I'm one of the rare breed of people who gets along well with my in-laws. In fact, I truly do feel like they're a second family to me. That's one of the reasons it really breaks my heart sometimes when I think about all they've been through over the last few years. July has not been good to them, lately. In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago that my mother-in-law shattered her leg in a devastating accident that took her six months to recover from. She was just starting to get her mobililty back when the chest pains started. And it was two years ago this month that my father-in-law passed away from pancreatic cancer; she was just starting to come out of the fog of depression and grief when she broke her leg. So this woman has not had a rest for the last three years, almost. And yet, she continues to fight to survive and I really admire that.

So I guess it's appropriate that it's time for Brad and me to sign up for Purple Ride again this year and start to raise some money. It's a biking event that just started last year, a 25-mile bike ride to raise money to donate to PanCan to help support research and outreach programs for pancreatic cancer. Last year, we raised about $2000.

This year, they've changed the course and now we'll be going on a 50-mile ride and hoping to raise at least as much as we did last year.

So here's where I try to cash in on our little sob story. The fact: bad things happen to good people. Sometimes many bad things. And it isn't fair. So why not try to do something to help, in some small way? That's what we're trying to do. If you'd like to support our effort, it would be much appreciated.