Lindsay Nichole

The week started with Eileen recovering from a one day flu and then me having it for a little more than a day. She got sick and then I got really sick…I was so sick that I couldn’t take my chemo. That was a first. Even so, when I get that sick, I’m reminded of those who are that sick regularly especially via chemo. In the midst of all this, I was tracking our daughter-in-law’s labor progression. At 9:56 pm on Tuesday night, our granddaughter was born!! Her name is Lindsay Nichole Doss. She was twenty inches long and seven pounds, one ounce.
On Wednesday, I headed up to see the baby. I came home the next afternoon and then headed back up Friday with Eileen. We spent the weekend up there. We held and held that baby. During the daytime, that baby wasn’t put down once!! Even at night, Eileen and I stayed up until 1am and midnight respectively holding Lindsay while everyone else went to bed. Our son and daughter-in-law can worry about Lindsay being used to being held too much while we aren’t there!!
We took a load of pictures. I posted 36 of them at our Shutterfly site. If you don’t still have the sight, email me and I will forward it to you. As I was posting the pictures, I noticed that we didn’t have many of our son and basically none of our daughter-in-law. She basically only got to hold the baby when the baby was hungry, and we couldn’t very well take a picture of that!! We’ll add more of our son and daughter-in-law next weekend.
A friend warned me that grandparents turn “silly” when it comes to their grandchildren. Considering our behavior of this past weekend, I think she is right!!

Good

C.S. Lewis wrote: “Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.” In contrast, our society seems to strongly be moving into mixing good and evil, co-mixing the two. Yet, in fact, good is in opposition to evil and outgrows lesser forms of good. Our quest, should we choose it, is to seek the perfection of good and righteousness in our lives, not to co-mingle good and bad. This so-mingling of good and bad is eating at the very foundations of our faith and our nation’s founding principles. We are witnessing a lot of change in our nation. However, the change is muddling the lines between right and wrong, rather than right becoming “continually more different” from wrong.

I’m still making adjustments in my eating. I’m still not eating pork or beef as they seem to definitely create an intensified adverse acid situation in my stomach. I am getting along better with my stomach and will lay low with the beef and pork as long I can tell a positive difference. I’m also making other dietary changes to help my stomach out. They are still in the experimental stage at this point!! I’m going to make another attempt at getting more exercise too. My leg cramps and stomach pains limited me quite a bit. However, since the stomach pains aren’t as intense, I’m going to give it another try and see what my legs will tolerate these days.
We went to our youngest daughter’s marching band competition Saturday evening. The band did real well and the weather was nice. Last year we froze at the same competition even though we huddled under a quilt in the stands. We have a very busy month ahead of us and I’m trying to gear up for it. I welcome the challenge but dread the battle - - - if that makes sense!!

Adjustments

I’ve been getting some very nice comments on the book. It has worked out nice that it has been a year since you read the blog initially, and now it has been so meaningful reading it again in book form. I very much appreciate the nice and touching comments.
As you know, I’ve been making some dietary changes geared at making me feel better. So far, my adjustments have helped my stomach somewhat, especially during the daytime, prior to taking the next chemo dosage. I’ll give the adjustments more time before I definitively say they are helping. At that point, I’ll hopefully have settled on some adjustments and will report their effectiveness. One thing which seems to be making a difference, though, is meat. The less meat I eat the better my stomach seems to do. Again, that is just a tentative finding at this point. My theory is that since the chemo is such an acidic concoction, and meat digestion requires significant acid production to digest, that decreasing meat intake is decreasing the acidity of my stomach. I know it’s not rocket science but whatever makes me feel better is good enough for me!! Anyway, my stomach is not good enough for me to stop taking my stomach medicine but it is better enough for me to take notice. But again, I’ll see how the adjustments pan out with a little more time.
When I was in practice with my father, I once asked him the science behind a treatment he used on a patient. He responded by saying, “Do you see that picture hanging on the wall?” I answered, yes. He then went on to say, “If a patient comes in with a certain condition, and that picture falls off the wall and hits him, and it makes him better…the next patient with that same condition better look out for that picture!!” Although my father was a very science orientated chiropractic physician, he was ultimately more concerned about patients getting well than the science behind it. That’s kind of the way I am with these nutritional adjustments I’m making. I really don’t care about the science behind it if it makes me feel better!!

“Big Deal”

If you haven’t checked the blog since last week, I hope you’ll notice that I made a new post last Wednesday. It deals with my blood test results for which we’re very thankful.

As you know, I’ve been in tough negotiations with the publisher about the picture they left out of the book. I deem it very important because two posts are about the picture. They contend that the book is “very marketable” without the picture. However, they have inserted the picture in book. They just won’t reprint the order in which I got all of our books. So, that puts me in the dilemma of having 200 books here at the house with the picture missing in them. Friends tell me that it is no “big deal” to the reader and that it is only a “big deal” to me. So this is what I’ve decided to do: I will go ahead and start filling book orders this week, after first going through each book to insert a loose leaf picture in the appropriate page. If this remedy is unsatisfactory to you, I will refund your money and you may keep the book.

Finally, I didn’t mention in Wednesday’s post that the doctor and I talked about my dietary ways and cancer. Coincidentally, some friends have made comments to me about dietary changes they made to help them in their battles. Although I have a rather extensive background in nutrition, I’ve been researching the latest and greatest. As always, what one expert attests to, another one debunks. So, I’ll be making some changes which will hopefully give me a stronger internal chemistry from which to battle. There is so much conflicting data out there that I’m going to latch on to what makes sense to me and just go with it. At this point, I surmise that having some strategy is better than none at all. Of all the scenarios, this one has stuck with me the most: If your fish are sick from swimming in unclean water, what do you do? Do you keep pumping medicines into the fish to keep it healthy, or do you clean the water? I’m going to try to clean my internal water up a bit and see if that helps me be stronger and feel better.