Before I left Texas

Before I left Texas, some college friends came to bid farewell. In this photo: (l-r) Phil Moore, Laura and James Wilson, Jane Collette, Andy and Patsy Phillips, me, Mark Thomasy, Cindy and Bruce Welch. My parents, Laura's mom LaVerne, my niece Valerie and my nephew Nathan were also there. I had bronchitis at the time, and was kind of "out of it," so I didn't get to visit as well as I would have liked, and I can't remember some of it either (meds?) but I will never forget their gesture of love at coming together on my behalf. Thanks to you all!

P.S. For the record, this is not my hairdo of choice. This is what you get when you let your hair grow out after 11 months from a state of baldness.

College friends and health updates

Sorry I haven't been updating the blog lately. I took a hit from chemo, but chemo is over now.

My brother J and I got a visit from some college friends yesterday. Wes S. and Steve P. came to visit for the day. We actually needed some help with some things, and they volunteered to come pitch in and help us out. We loved the fellowship time with them. Not only had we all gone to college together in Brownwood, but after college we all ended up in Fort Worth and attended the same church. I hadn't seen them in about 30 years, but we kind of picked up where we left off.

L to R: Wes, Steve, Elizabeth, J

We took 17 photos, and my brother J made goofy faces in all 17 of them. Someday I'm going to make a collage of his goofy face photos. Every goofy face is different.

In other news:

I defied the odds for months, but as you can guess from the photos, I finally lost all my hair. Well, not ALL my hair. I think I had about 137 strands of hair still intact at its lowest point. It started growing back a day or two ago, so I decided to own up to it. I never shaved my head through the entire ordeal, because I wanted to see what happened if you didn't shave it. Now I know. I'll tell you more about it some other time.

I'm having surgery this Wednesday in Houston. The surgeon will remove all the lymph nodes on the right side of my neck. Please pray for me. I don't know how much I can post during recovery, but when I am able, I"ll try to do a better job about updating this blog. It just feels a little strange to talk about life in Texas on a blog called "Stories of the Middle Kingdom." But I will. Thanks for understanding.