Joe's Hosptital BooBoo

I am so sorry that I am so behind the times. I got really overwhelmed there for a while.

As most of you know, Joe ended up back in the hospital in February. He got the flu really bad and became severely dehydrated. This caused his blood pressure to drop really low. We had called his doctor and told her that his pressure was very low and his pulse was running at about 38-40 beats per minute. She said, oh, that is normal for the flu.................. Go figure. The next night he began dry heaving and went out completely, as in his heart stopped and his eyes rolled up in his head. I could not get him out of his chair because of the angle it was at so I hit his chest really hard and shook and yelled at him and he came back. This happened three times before the ambulance came. Was very scary. Brenna and I spent the night with him in the Trauma unit at Good Shepard. They said the first chamber of his heart had quite beating. They got him stabilized finally and the next afternoon he was transferred to Shreveport VA where they brought his kidneys back into functioning and got him stabilized the rest of the way. The amazing thing is that he didn't suffer a heart attack through all of this.

Strangely enough this incident has finally settled Joe's fear of dying. Me on the other hand it put into a tail spin. Of course I am the one who suffers when he gets to go home to be with Jesus. All of this culminated in me hearing a message where the lady shared about how that when a sheep falls down it cannot get up, it is called a "cast" sheep. That is what it means when it says in the scriptures to "Cast your cares upon Me...." I have been practicing that lately and what a difference. I am almost human again. I had a physical collapse this last Sunday and slept the whole day practically and now I feel myself again.

This crazy weather has been so warm we have been eating dinner outside and I have been doing my morning bible study on our screen porch, in my shirt sleeves. We came home from church tonight and had to turn the air conditioner on because the house was up to 77 degrees. Crazy stuff. It has been like a gift from God to be outside during this time of sitting beside His still waters.

Love

Teri

Joe's Small Heart Attack

As many of you know, Joe had a small heart attack Wed night. That makes 8 in one year. Turns out that what we thought was his blood sugar going wacky for no reason and continuing to climb were really heart incidents so it seems that he has been having small ones for over a month. Now that we know the proper interpretations of his symptoms we should do better.

They considered doing a heart cath  but decided to try a few more changes in meds to see if we can stop these incidents. If it doesn't then they will do the heart cath and try to stint. There are a couple of places they might be able to put a stint in but they are highly risky places so we are trying to avoid that. 

They said they will still clear him to have the procedure to reduce the tumors in the bladder this month. 

Thank you for all your continuing prayer and love. they released Joe from the hospital Friday!!! Praise the Lord! How is that for a good Friday the 13th?! He is just a little week and still has a lot of fluid retention but is doing good. We actually all went out as a family to dinner to celebrate, then he came home and went to sleep :-)

Thank you all for all your prayers and encouragement and love!

Brenna is now looking at possibly working as a volunteer with special needs and hurting kids at a camp in Idaho this summer. She is very very excited. She continues to make necklaces to sell to help raise money for her missions trips. I will post some pictures real soon. Most of them she sells as fast as she can make them. 

I am doing pretty good, now that my hubby is home. Have been really busy at TECH. Worked over Christmas break to get the web update done that I was doing for Weaving Hope, a women's shelter ministry in Guatemala. You can check it out at weavinghopeministry.org  It still needs proofed but is 90% finished. Had a whole bunch of rush jobs right after the new year and then it slowed down right before Joe went into the Hospital. Gods timing is always perfect. 

Love 

TERI

Radically Radiant

Sooooooo

We went to Shreveport this past Tuesday so the Urologist could see how well the radiation had done at shrinking the tumors in Joe's bladder. Much to their surprise they were far smaller than they anticipated. Soo, this means that they are going to be able to go in through a cathetor and burn them down even smaller and clean out around the uretor so Joe's kidney can drain properly. We will be able to manage the cancer in this way from now on. No more radiation.

YAY!

PRAISE THE LORD!

Radiation Saturation

Dear Friends and Family:

Happy Joe

YAAAYYYYYY!!!!! Joe is all done with radiation! He tolerated it very well. He got very tired the last week and a half and was anxious for it to finish. He is still very tired and sleeps a lot of hours but is slowly recovering. They want to wait about a month before we do any tests and let his body calm down. In Dec (we don't have the date yet) he will go see the Urologist at the VA in Shreveport and they will take a look at the tumors through a scope to see how they are looking.

Tomorrow is our 19th anniversary. Last year I thought we had celebrated our last one together. Thank you God for giving us another year together, and hopefully a few more!

Here you see the beautiful necklace and 
earrings that Brenna made for me. 

We celebrated my birthday in October very quietly. We worked around the house all day getting things done I wanted done for a bunch of company we were having the next weekend. That evening we went to the international banquet at Hope Fellowship as part of our missions conference. It was really cool as we have a outreach to African Nationals here in Longview. We had a whole bunch of countries represented, 8 or 9 I think.

Recently I have made some new friends, Sharon, who is a musician and reviews books. We have lovely rambling conversations. And Joy who is also a musician and studying to be a teacher. Sharon has a 16 year old son who is one of Brennas best friends. Joy has a 16 year old daughter who is also a new friend of Brenna's. We are all going to a game night at Sharons next weekend.  It is funny all the musical people I am getting to know. Our life's seem to be surrounded by music any more.

This last weekend we had 1st Friday Coffee house on Friday. I ran it this time, under Molly's supervision, the December one I am in charge of by myself... well other people at Northwood will be helping, but Molly and Matt are gone for a month so I am heading it up. Saturday we went to a small concert at a private home for the Alaska String Band. They are a family of musicians and are extremely good. We got their two latest CDs and Joe has been listening to them almost non stop every since. Guess I need to get the rest of their music for him for Christmas.

Brenna also is still my darling babysitter of Eviline. What do you think? Brenna has gotten very involved with doing a Christmas program and preparing to go on a short missions trip to New Orleans over New Years. In the spring she is working on doing a short missions trip over spring break to an orphanage just across the border into mexico through Last Days Ministries, which is the one founded by Keith and Melody Green.

I am still staying very very busy at work. With Molly gone I am even more busy.

Thank you for all your love and prayers

Teri

Radiation and Celebrations

Dear Friends and Family...

Thought you all would like and update on what is going on with Joe. As you may know, he started radiation last Wed. So far he is having no ill effects from it. His blood sugars have been a bit crazy but the doctor said that isn't the radiation yet, it is probably just stress. He sees the radiation oncologists every Wed. He leaves every morning at 7:30 am and is back to work by 9:30 and works a few hours. It is looking unlikely that he will get any chemo because of his heart. The radiation will not kill the cancer by itself but it will shrink the tumors and make his life much longer and more comfortable.

We have gotten the first results of cat scans back. They show a 4.5 cm mass on outside of one kidney, which we don't know what it is yet. Hopefully it is not also cancer. The kidney and ureter are also swollen on one side. This is caused by one of the masses partly blocking one of the ureters. In the bladder there are multiple tumors, the largest are 5 cm and 5.8 cm.

The good news is that although we were told before that his heart is enlarged, it isn't. That is good news.

Two weekends ago Brenna and Teri participated in a PKD walkathon. Brenna dressed up as a fairy and did face painting on the kids. It was really nice.










The anniversary of Brenna's adoption happened in April. We wanted to do something special to celebrate but it is hard when Joe cannot do much physically. Well, this last Saturday we finally found something. We went to a wildlife drive through safari in Cherokee county, about 50 miles south of us. It was well worth the drive. We paid $15 per person and were each given a big bag of food pellets to feed the animals. They of course know that the car things have yummy food so most of them come hurrying over when they see a car. We drove around for well over 2 hours through this thing and saw most of the animals on the list. You have to be really careful because most of them will put their heads in the car if you let them and snatch anything in reach, your glasses, your hat, whatever.

There are two kinds of deer here,
I don't remember all the types

As you can see, he stuck his head in the car before we
could get the window up. This was a miniture donkey

Pretty, huh?

They came in herds and snuffled around for our pellets

Ether an emu or a rea. These dudes were really fast.
The window was going up really fast. 

The most agressive though were the zebras. Many of them
got their heads in the car. 

While I was snapping this one another one poked his head
around the corner and right into Brenna's lap

Radiant Radiology

Well, this has been an amazing day to say the least. At Joe's primary care doctor he found out this morning that although he has been struggling with sharp spikes in blood sugar and having to take tons of insulin to bring it down his A1C number which is your blood glucose over a 3 month period is 6.5, which, while not perfect is the best Joe's has ever been since they have been charting it.

Then we went and saw the radiologist in Tyler. What a pistol! We were there for 4 1/2 hours. It seems that the VA has only initially sent over a tiny bit of paper work and they listed him as hospice palliative care only. (WOW, I am still MAD /APPALLED at that)  So she was going to refuse the referral, but when her nurse talked to Joe on the phone she told the Doctor that "He sounds rather perky for a hospice patient, I think we should see him."

So she went after the VA for Joe's records. She personally talked to everyone of his doctors. She was hopping off of the walls by the time we saw her. She said that when she asked them why nothing had been done for him they said, "Well, he can't have any kind of anesthetic," her response was, "And your point is?" She said he should have at least had a stint put in the ureter that is partially blocked by one of the tumors because one of the kidneys is enlarged. (news to us)

Anyway, she said that she wasn't waiting for them and their games, they sent him over with no current tests or anything so she did two scans, one with no dye and one with dye in the bladder only. They also got him all set up for the radiation with the markings on him. He has a holter test on Monday and Tuesday and she still needs to get some more heart info on him so they will do the first treatment next Thursday and get the rest scheduled and his exact treatment level nailed down at that time.

She also told us that bladder cancer does not normally metastasize so if it hasn't yet there is a good chance that it wont. Having radiation or chemo will make no difference to that. She said the radiation would be much better with chemo but even without it we will be able to shrink the tumors and possibly kill them. She said that they will respond very well as high grade aggressive cancer responds very quickly to radiation, it is the slow growing kind that is hard to kill. A lot of the doctors had said that don't worry about it because you can live with bladder cancer for years. She said that is true but you definitely don't want to because it is extreemely painful and all that.

I think we are still a bit blown away after so long being told there is nothing that can be done.

Praise the Lord.

Thank you all for your continuing prayers.

Love ya

Radiology

Sorry it's been so long since I have done any updates. First I was exhausted and then I got really busy... well, that is all the excuses I can think of.

This was taken at the first time we went to the
MoJo Coffee house to hear Molly and Co. play.
 Joe Looks like a deer caught in the headlights, Huh?!
I think I should Photoshop a smile on him.

You all know that we have not been able to find any way to treat Joe's cancer... well, a couple of weeks ago he had a very long appointment with his Urologist who is incredibly frustrated that he has not been able to help Joe. After a 45 minute conversation they decided he should go back and revisit Radiation with no Chemo, just to see if we could reasonably safely slow the tumors down. We saw the Radiologist at the VA in Shreveport Monday. She said that since we talked to her last the VA has added fee basis where we can go to certain private doctors under certain conditions. It seems that there is a Radiology clinic in Tyler. It not only is closer, at 37 miles as opposed to 50 miles, the radiation machine is much better and more precise. She said that with that machine a low dose of radiation would have a lot less likelihood of causing harm than the one in Shreveport. We go for a consultation tomorrow, the 38th of Sept. That was just 3 days! The main dangers are that it could increase his diabetes and because he has diverticulitis, which we also cannot treat because he cannot have any anesthetics, that could be aggravated also. We are opting to not do any chemo though as we feel that Joe's heart would not withstand even lower doses.

Since the trip across the US end of July and first week of August Joe has been just a bit weaker than before. It took him about a month to get his blood sugars back under control. He is not responding well to insulin any more so he tries much harder to keep it from going up. He cannot do as much as before without having days of tiredness and chest pain at nigh. Some dear friends traded us chairs. They took the small pink chair Joe had been sleeping in off and on and gave us their big puffy recliner. It was a good deal on both sides as the spot they had the recliner in was too small for it and Joe needed something more comfortable for sleeping in. It was God's perfect timing as he has been having to sleep sitting up a lo more lately.

I, Teri, have been swamped at work. That is a good thing :-), if tiring. I also am still loosing weight, down 22 lbs now and falllllling. I LOVE it!

Brenna came down with a croupy cough right before we left for deputation. We finally got her into a specialist after we got back and come to find out that her lungs are a bit misshaped and she has a longtime infection down in them. She now sees a specialist to treat her for asthma.

Joe held the insolation up while We all ran around
stapling it in place 

Other than all of that we are all doing quite well. We finally, with  lot of help from our friends, got Joe's garage insulated and installed vents in the roof. What a relief for Joe. Now he can comfortably go out and putz on his guitars. This weekend, after Brenna does some face painting at a fundraiser for PKD, she will be helping Joe fix the front forks on the Harley so I can start riding it again now that the weather has gotten over this 100+ degree garbage. Now it is just in the 90's and feels marvelous.

Spontaneously formed group, they called themselves
the Puffy Penguins

Matt Mahr concert. Most of Northwood church went.
We took up the whole 4th and 5th row from the front and
then some. It was an awesome time of worship. I swore
that all the songs were just for me, but then Molly said they
were all about her, Natalie said, "Uh, uh! Me, it was all
about Me" That is the Holy Spirt for you, speaks to
each persons heart individually. Too cool!

The concert was Thursday, Friday a whole bunch of us from
Northwood went to MoJo's in Henderson to support
Molly and Joel as they performed there for 4 hours. I love how this church
just loves to do everything together. 

We packed the church for a surprise 60th birthday party
for pastors wife Gail. 

Brenna and others doing the Macharena (sp) at Gails
party

We have been going to a lot of music events. Brenna sang in a group at the First Friday Coffee house, first in a group and then did two beautiful solos. She was really excited that she did so well. She is writing songs now also. Brenna now does BSF (intercity Bible Study Fellowship) on Mondays. She baby sits for my bible study on Tuesdays. We go to bible study and Brenna goes to Elevation, which is a light bible study and then kids hang out place at the largest church in town, on Wed. We usually have something going Fridays and always on Saturdays and church on Sunday. WHEW. Life is good but, as I said, Busy.

Well, off to bed.

Love you all, and thank you for your continued prayers