Five years later ....

Five years, four months, and eighteen days later, I'm back. I didn't expect to return to the blog, and it never even entered my mind to make another post until yesterday, but here I am.

I left off in Paris in 2019. After a few days in Paris and a few weeks in Italy (it was my first trip to Europe), I returned to China to pack and say my goodbyes. I sent Mimi back to the US via Shanghai and Frankfurt in early April. On May 18th, I boarded a flight and said farewell to my beloved home away from home for most of my adult life, China.

Once back in the US, I had foot surgery, then many other medical appointments in an attempt to get my health into better shape. My cancer treatment of 2014-2016 really knocked me for a loop, and I wasn't recovering as I was told I could expect. I ended up in the hospital the day after Christmas with pneumonia. Then I continued my lung rehabilitation for my paralyzed right diaphragm a few months later when Covid hit. It was a good thing I wasn't in China when Covid came along. If you know, you know.

I had another surgery later in 2020, and it was decided that my health wasn't strong enough to return overseas. It wasn't strong enough to do much in the US either.

I spent much of my time helping my parents, who lived next door.

In 2021, my dad was in and out of hospitals ten times. He passed away in November 2021 at the age of 88. We have the blessed assurance that he is in the presence of his savior, Jesus Christ. We sure miss him a lot though. Life is just not as sweet without him in it. You can read his obituary here. I thank God every day for letting me have him for my father. He was the best man I've ever known.

I tried to fill his shoes helping out my mom, doing the bookkeeping and taking her where she needed to go. It has sure been fun spending time with her. I wish my energy level was up to doing it all, but fatigue has made it hard to keep up with everything she and I both need to do. My mom is 87 years old right now.

My sweet dog, Mimi, turned 19 years old in January 2024. She did so well in her old age. On the night of March 17, 2024, we both spent the night on the floor, because she couldn't go anywhere else. She passed away the next morning at 4:45 a.m. and was buried in my backyard the following day. What joy that dog brought to my heart and my life! I can't imagine every having another furry friend like her.

Too much loss ... too much sadness. 

My doctors consider my medical problems too complex and overlapping to try to figure out any great solutions. Their goal is to keep me stable. I have bigger dreams though. I pray that God will renew my strength and let me live my life to the fullest. Just "getting by" is something, but God has much more in mind for a child of His.

I hope this brief synopsis of the past five years fills in a few gaps. Let me know if you read this, because I'm not advertising my return to the blog, and I'm going to assume that I'm the only one that sees this unless you let me know otherwise. I'm happy to have a place to post my photos and keep an online journal once again. 

And, if I ever disappear again, don't necessarily assume the worst. I'm glad you're here!  

It's been awhile

I'm sitting on my balcony with Mimi, watching the rush hour traffic below on this cool, overcast spring day in the Middle Kingdom. I know it's been way too long since I updated this blog. I don't even know if anyone bothers to check it for updates anymore. 

Since I finished cancer treatment in January 2016 and had surgery later that same month, I've been on the mend. But just when I thought I should be feeling better, I felt worse. I returned overseas according to schedule, but endurance to make it through the day without napping eluded me. I would do my work during the day, then crash before I could make it through the evening hours (when I would normally update this blog). Furthermore, I couldn't catch my breath, huffing and puffing when it didn't seem reasonable that I should be doing so. Doctors checked me out, and even tested me for heart failure due to the gasping for breath. No one could find anything wrong.

But when I went to MD Anderson for my annual check up in February 2017, they did a chest x-ray. They checked my previous x-rays against the new one and realized that the phrenic nerve in my neck had been severed in one of my neck surgeries, and it had paralyzed my right diaphragm. 

(Radiation can also sever phrenic nerves, but two doctors told me they believed it to be a result of surgery.)

A paralyzed right diaphragm buckles, pushing up against the right lung so that it can't fill up with air. There is no medical solution for a paralyzed diaphragm. One just learns to live with it, making sure not to do things that cause shortness of breath, like climbing stairs, jogging to the mail box, or visiting Lhasa. The pulmonologist said I can't run (because I can't breathe), and I can't lift weights (because my right arm can't be raised more than 45 degrees). He suggested walking for exercise and keeping to light housework and office work. Another doctor suggested I take up yoga, but what yoga pose doesn't require the use of your arms to hold you up off the floor? I tried yoga before cancer came my way, and it was painful even then.

So my new normal is to take it easy. I've had a spurt of energy the past week that has kept me awake in the evenings, like normal people, and I hope it stays around for a long time. I'll make every effort to post more bloggy stuff soon, so I hope you'll check back from time to time.

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.

In Houston

Sorry for the blog absence. As I have mentioned before, I am having a health crisis, and I am in Houston now to visit MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Because I don't want this blog to be tainted by the ugly details of cancer, I am not putting the fine details of my health information on here. But if you want to read about my health details so you can better know how to pray for me, I invite you to refer to offtheb10path.wordpress.com.

Please pray for me tomorrow morning as I go for a new biopsy that should settle my diagnosis once and for all. I won't know the results for a full week after the biopsy is done. Thank you for your intercession before God on my behalf. I believe He will hear and act according to your requests placed before Him.

Sippable vices

One month and one day ago, I said good-bye to a longtime friend, a friend who was never more than an arm's reach away, a friend who assisted me on a daily basis, a friend who pumped lifeblood into me. I said good-bye to coffee.

A full week before I said adios to the java, I parted ways with Diet Coke (and any soda for that matter). The soda thing was based on the possibility that artificial sweeteners and bubbly stuff might be damaging my body in some way. The only bubbly I've had since then was when I had some Alka-Seltzer this morning.

The coffee thing was about the caffeine and its dehydrating effect ... which may be a source of some pain issues I have.

Where I grew up in west Texas, the tap water was fairly impossible to drink. I think this is where my penchant for consuming non-water tasty drinks got started.

I started drinking coffee in an addictive kind of way when I lived in Colorado. It was pretty cold in the Rockies, but coffee kept me a little warmer on the inside. I continued drinking coffee when I moved to Hong Kong, then to China. Even when I couldn't get coffee, my parents mailed it to me. Then when Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts came to China, I was able to buy my own coffee beans (even though it cost twice the price for half as much coffee).

I started drinking Cokes in China when I realized it was probably much cleaner than the water. I drank a lot of Cokes in the early years. I could boil water, but there would be so much sand at the bottom of the kettle that heat could not eradicate, that it just didn't feel like a wise decision to consume it. Later, Diet Cokes and then Coke Zero arrived on the scene. Bottled water in big dispensers also arrived, but rumors persisted about the cleanliness of its source. Carrying sodas up five flights of stairs was not easy, but since it had to be done whether it was water or soda, and the price was about the same, I went with the tasty option (soda).

In the past month, I drank more water than I have ever before in my life. I should feel extraordinarily healthy -- right? -- but for some reason I feel just the same. What's up with that? I'll give this experiment a little longer, maybe until the end of the year. If I don't detect health benefits by then, I might re-unite with my steaming little coffee beans. I think I will permanently forego the sodas though (which I don't miss).

P.S. I had several weeks' worth of caffeine withdrawal headaches in the past month, in case you were wondering.