Sir, the Viper is flown from the seated position

Dear Friends,

It's been an eventful week, a lot of things to report. I suppose we'll start with medical. We finished the first round of the new chemo on Tuesday with relatively low side effects. Some fatigue and chemo brain, mostly in the afternoon and subsiding by evening, and no nausea. White counts and red counts, strangely enough, improved on their own without booster shots. The platelets did decrease slightly. So I shall have about two more weeks off before we do round two of the new chemo.

I had an interesting conversation with a medical professional I see occasionally who shed some light on advanced treatments. He said that the companies that develop advanced treatments need to show good success statistics to get them approved. So to improve those statistics, they often reserve advanced treatments for patients in the early stages of disease. Which caused him great frustration, because it often prevented him from giving advanced stage patients the advanced treatments that might help them the most. What a great system.

The tube feeding is going much better. We tried a number of different canned liquid foods, which all failed by causing me great intestinal distress. So my fabulous wife concocted our own blend of liquid food in the Vita Mix turbo blender machine. It has protein from brown rice bran. You need protein, but animal source proteins require an enzyme that your body also uses to fight cancer, so it should be from a plant. And soy protein has something that mimics estrogen that can also interfere with cancer fighting. So brown rice bran seems to be a good source. It also includes a powder based on leafy green plants and liquid wheat grass juice. These contain lots of cancer fighting elements. The natural healers call it turning on your "green shield". Deanna also adds a number of vitamin and mineral supplements. My weight seems to have stabilized, and my intestinal distress is far better. My wife has outsmarted all the big national companies and their labs that concoct the liquid food!

I have a check up appointment tomorrow, so it will be interesting to see the official weight and blood counts.

I discovered that the Texas legislature passed a very generous measure that eliminates property taxes for 100% disabled vets. This will make it easier for us to buy a house. In addition, on October 22, we will have resided in Texas for a year, making me eligable to receive a .5% discount on the mortgage rate, another very generous Texas measure for 100% disabled vets. We are looking at a development here in McKinney, and I am about 90% certain that we will sign a build/purchase contract tommorow. We have selected a single story, 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 3 car garage plan.

The blog title today is a rough quote from the original Battlestar Galactica series. A virus runs through the fleet's fighter pilots, and they of course get attacked from the aliens. Boomer, one of their top fighter pilots, decides to fly even though he is sick. The commander stops him and says, You can't fly, you can barely even stand up. Boomer's reply is the title. I have discovered that I may still be able to safely do some limited flying, even with all my medical issues. I am very excited about this, and dreaming up all sorts of ways to serve God with flying!

All in all, God has been very good to us this week, gracious, kind, full of healing and provision!

In addition to my usual request for prayers for health, I would also humbly ask that you pray that I have wisdom regarding this house purchase tommrow. Also, my Grandmother has some kind of skin problem plaging her -might be scabbies-that it would be healed as well. She is 85, has alot of other health issues, and just doesn't need to have this piled on as well.

Yours in Christ,
-Mike