For those who pray specifically

In Woody's words:

As many of you know I'm not praying to be healed. My one and only prayer, which I pray many many times, is that God's will be done. For a number of years I've attempted not to pray for any thing unless I know it's God's will. Now this is not a hard and fast rule--but just an attempt I've been making for some time.

Now most of you know I'm a guinea pig in a research program--the 37th guinea pig to be in this particular study. They've been developing this protocol for over ten years trying to get it to work. They lost quite a few patients in the beginning years as they were learning what worked and what didn't work. Currently the majority of patients in this protocol have no improvement. But some have absolutely miraculous results. And some have mixed results. One lady had a huge tumor in an internal organ and a small tumor somewhere else. The huge tumor was completely gone, the small tumor was still there. They surgically removed the small tumor and she's been symptom free for six years.

First off I'd like to thank each of you for praying for me to this point--as you probably know I'm functional and could fool a lot of people into thinking I'm perfectly healthy.

Now, while I'm not willing to pray anything about my health except God's will be done, I know most of y'all haven't so limited yourselves. So I'm going to ask those who wish to do so to pray for total healing. And according to NIH folk if this is to occur it will happen in the next two or three months! So we're in a crucial period. I have 48.6 billion tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes that have hopefully multiplied to even greater numbers and it's time to see if they're going to be able to fight the cancer.

Now I very much believe in praying specifically so I thought I would list my tumors in case you wanted to pray even more specifically. They are

1)perhaps one on top of my head (black area) that we just found when my hair came out!
2)behind my right ear (like a swollen lymph node, but dark under the skin)
3)two tiny rock hard places under a dark spot on my skin on my sternum
4)in my left calf (a hard dark spot that actually sticks out a little)
These four are visible and easy to keep track of
5)under my left arm pit
6)under my right arm pit
7)on my right scapula
8)one to several in my chest (subcutaneous)
9)Maybe one on my liver (Dr. Rosati said she saw something on a Vanderbilt scan (nobody else saw it), so I had to have a liver scan on my previous trip--but I never found out the results
10)in the bones below and above my left knee (Dr. Sosman said if we were to treat those surgically it would require a total knee replacement)
11)in a bone in my right leg

Of course, this doesn't include the three I've had surgically removed.
1)golf ball (small lime) size tumor from my upper left arm bone
2)apricot size from my right side
3)peach size from my left scapula
(No need to pray for these. If surgery got it all it will never return and I'll never get another melanoma from surgical removal of a tumor (as told by Dr. Prieto at NIH))

So you can see praying for total healing is a tall order. So maybe, if you'd like to pray that each of the tumors gets healed, calling each out by name, you now have that option.

Back to Lois' words:

We got up this morning, Woody showered, I changed his dressing and flushed the lines that go into his Hickman line, we both got ready and went to Sunday School. Woody taught his Sunday School class. When we came home I attempted a new dish that you view in the picture above. It is called "Balsamic Chicken." Woody checked out a cookbook at the library yesterday and decided that this recipe looked good. Since I had all the ingredients, I decided to try it today. I think that I need a few more lessons on "plating up" a dish. I drizzled parsley olive oil around the plate and then dropped reduced balsamic vinegar onto the olive oil and then placed the chicken pieces on sauteed mushrooms. I did wipe the plate clean around the edges...but it looks like I could have done a better job! Oh, well, at least the end results were declared a "keeper" by Woody. The dish was quite tasty.

Woody has rested this afternoon. He still knows that his body hasn't remade all its red blood cells, platelets, etc. He tires quite easily. He walked to the compost pile this afternoon (Where in the world is the compost boy when we need him!?)...Woody definitely felt the effort of doing that and came back in to rest in his recliner. One of the times that he abandoned his recliner, I claimed it to sit for a few minutes and promptly fell asleep for a little while. Guess that recliner is helping us both rest!