Johns Hopkins Review

We had a very nice time in Baltimore. Hopkins got us an excellent rate at a beautiful hotel and we went out to Little Italy for dinner after Sam's MRI on my birthday. The next morning, Tues. the 10th, we met with a doctor at JHH. He gave us the report from their team of doctors which pretty much concurred with our Reston oncologist although he thought that the mass on Sam's liver was not covering quite as much of his liver.

JHH recommended the same chemo cocktail as Reston has suggested and feels that this is the best approach along with eliminating white sugars, fatty foods and red meats. Because Sam experiences early satiatity they also agreed with lots of small high calorie meals throughout the day. Now the challenge for me, Sam's resident dietician is to fatten him up without fattening me up :o)

The JHH doc said we could still go on our little "vacation" before starting chemo so we are at our son, Scotty's in NYC for two days and will go on to meet the first ladies in RI and ME as we had planned. We will spend a couple days in ME before driving home to start our weekly "cocktail hours". We will do two on and one off weeks rotating like that for nine weeks and then re evalutate things and see how the chemo is working.

Please pray that Sam's body responds well to all this and that we do well emotioally. I was re-reading Chuck Swindol's book "Encouragement for Life" this morning. He starts his second chapt. with I Peter 4:19 which has the words "entrust" to a "faithful creator". Chuck goes on to explain the word "entrust" this way.

Entrust. What a wonderful word! It is a banking term in the original text, meaning to deposit. When it comes to trials, we depost ourselves into God's safekeeping and that deposit yields eternal dividends."