Dear Friends –

We got home from the hospital at 2 yesterday afternoon, after a week at St Mary’s in Grand Rapids. (I’ve discovered that seven days in the hospital make one weak.) It’s good to be home. In case you missed the beginning of this story, I was admitted last Wednesday with severe shortness of breath, caused by several new blood clots in my lungs. After several days of IV blood thinner (Heparin) to help dissolve those clots, plus a couple days of Eliquis, an oral blood thinner, I was pretty well recovered, though my platelet and kidney numbers had taken a nose dive. They’ve slowly been climbing back up, but are not yet high enough for the oncologist to allow me to start chemotherapy Round 10. So that is currently scheduled for Thursday, December 21.

The oncologist is quite confident that this incident was caused by my body’s reaction to the chemotherapy. The chemicals they pump into me each round are pretty severe; even though they’re only giving me 75% of the normal dose each round, it still hits me pretty hard. The hope is that it’s hitting the remaining cancer cells even harder, those in the spot on my lung and those still on the loose in my bloodstream, with the intention to reduce the number of remaining cancer cells to zero.

This morning I was scheduled for my normal Physical Therapy appointment, and even though I knew I couldn’t do it all, I decided to go and see how much I could do. Answer: not as much as I hoped, but more than if I’d stayed home. I got around the gym using a walker, and managed to do the easiest third of the routine.

The current daily series on james-ayers.com is 21 Centuries of Christmas Music: over the next few days we’ll look at “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” “Huron Carol,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and “Away in a Manger.” That series will continue to Epiphany, with some very familiar carols and some that are not so well known. Also, starting January 1, we’ll begin a year-long series to encourage people to read through the whole Bible in 2024. If you’ve faithfully followed a devotional book that gives you two or three verses every day, at the end of the year you will have read about 3% of the Bible. If you want more of the scriptures than that, I invite you to come along and find out more about the remaining 97% of the Bible.

I am so thankful for all your prayers –