Good morning

Hi everyone. Well, I had to go to the doctor Tuesday. My ankle swelled up bigger than ever and it was stiff. That's what vacuuming will do to you. Anyway, I have a hard, velcro, plastic, splint kind of thing that has a gel pad to cover my ankle to stabilize it. They took x-rays and whatnot. My knees are very swollen now too, and almost hurt as much as my ankle. I'm supposed to keep it propped up for the next two to three weeks. I won't complain about that (much), but I was just making good progress on the scrap stuff. I think I probably "over did" it, and between that, vacuuming and some other housework, I just aggravated it. If I pace myself tomorrow, I'm sure I will be fine.

I'm awake right now because I have some allergy stuff going on. Keith was hot and we opened the window (he wanted to turn on the A/C and it's like 50 degrees out). It has been raining today off and on, so I think it stirred up something.

We have had AWFUL wind today. Just gusts that have blown stuff all over. It's nutty! I heard on the news that some tornadoes have touched down and there have been other wind related issues with trees blowing into people's houses, etc. If you could have heard the howling and all earlier, you'd believe it.

So, anyway, my eye is itchy and it's making my nose start up on me as well.

Maisy is starting to freak out on me. I don't know what's up with her. We have had her as a part of our family for about 4 years now. She was the first of the crazy man's felines to come seek refuge with us (we didn't know when we took her in that there were over 20 more cats at the crazy man's house just waiting to come visit us). The neighbor later told us that she was about 8 years old when he got her. So, if he's right, she'd be around 12 now. She is almost toothless and is very crotchety, but she's "majestic" (as Keith would say). Today she was just bouncing around attacking things. Then she just up and pooped on the carpet. Alex tried to bury it, he was pretty darned disgusted by her. I think she may be getting dementia. Do cats get that? I'm worried about her. Something's not right.

Please keep an e-mail friend of mine in prayer. His name is Bill and he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's the same time as Keith. Bill has one lymph node under his ribs that keeps lighting up his PET scans. They can't biopsy without opening his chest, so they aren't going to do that, but at the same time, the cancer doesn't seem to have spread very rapidly from his last scan to the previous one. The next typical step is for him to move on to an autologus stem cell transplant after high dose chemo. For what appears to be one little lymph node, doesn't that seem extreme? I am a true believer in letting doctors be doctors and that God performs miracles through them, but maybe this time, the prayer is just that God will perform a miracle by making that pesky cancerous lymph node just GO AWAY ... miraculously.

Keith had about a 70% chance of going into remission. Bill was in that 30% that didn't. I know that if you fall into the percent that is cured and defies the odds, then numbers don't mean a heck of a lot, but when I can look and put names and "faces", even though we haven't met, with the odds, it just scares me. I have other "friends" on the Hodgkin's list serv that have failed to attain remission after auto SCT's, and all of the other acronyms that are out there, but they managed to beat other odds and have survived. There are some that died before they could get to the next course of treatment.

It is just a grim reminder that cancer is now a part of our vocabulary, our lives, our fears... I don't want to get cynical, so I will stop. You know that most days I am full of hope, full of joy... There are days that I am just amazed that God has given us the gift of time. Time in and of itself... wow. You know? Just please keep Bill from GA in your prayers.