Hal’s oncologist visit and chemo went very well Friday. His immune system was nearly twice as strong as it had been at the last visit! We are so grateful for your prayers, God’s mercy is the only answer. The doctor was encouraging and laid out the next steps for us:

Hal will get chemo on April 2nd and then on April 19th while we are in Missouri. We are doing a Midwest speaking tour in April that will find us in Kansas City and then in Springfield, MO. We are so grateful for the Porters who are loaning us their house and the Cox health system in Springfield that has been wonderful in welcoming Hal to do chemo there. Please pray for health and strength as we share God’s Word and encouragement with folks at these conferences – we have a pretty grueling schedule, but we’re greatly looking forward to it.

On April 30th, Hal will get a PET scan that will tell us finally where we stand. There are three alternatives:

1 – The cancer hasn’t responded to the chemo: Immediately prepare for a stem cell transplant (not the controversial kind). They’ll remove Hal’s own stem cells/bone marrow and treat it to kill the cancer and store it. Meanwhile, he’ll receive high dose, drastic chemo to kill all his immune system. Then they’ll give him back his own cells to rebuild it. Not where we want to go.

2 – The cancer has partially responded: We’ll immediately add in high dose radiation to help kill the cancer.

3 – The cancer appears to be all dead: Hal will do two more months of the same chemo he’s been on, then receive half-dose radiation to the tumor site behind his breastbone. This is what we are asking the Lord to do – let Hal have complete response!

In the meantime, we are still doing all of the alternative things as well — and they seem to be helping his immune system recover. Hal has had remarkably few symptoms from the chemo — the Lord is answering your prayers! He is showing a pattern, though of feeling very sick two days after the chemo with stomach cramps, upset and exhaustion. Yesterday, he stayed in the bed all day – most unusual for him.

We’re thankful he felt great Saturday, though, when we had a party to celebrate our fourth son’s becoming a young adult. We had a turkey shoot and cookout and invited godly men in his life to share their wisdom with him. It was an incredible time and Hal stood up all day running the turkey shoot and grilling. God is so good!

Hal’s feeling better today, but Seth and David woke up vomiting during the night last night. Please pray that no one else, and especially not Hal, will get sick! I am feeling pretty overwhelmed today. I know that God is still sovereign and He has a purpose for allowing all of this. May we glorify Him through it!

You have no idea how much your love, gifts, prayers, and notes of encouragement mean to us. I don’t know how we’d make it without you! Thank you especially for spreading the word about our book – it helps us tremendously!

With much love,

Melanie

O Worship the King

O worship the King, all glorious above,
O gratefully sing His power and His love;
Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days,
Pavilioned in splendor, and girded with praise.

O tell of His might, O sing of His grace,
Whose robe is the light, whose canopy space,
His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,
And dark is His path on the wings of the storm.

The earth with its store of wonders untold,
Almighty, Thy power hath founded of old;
Established it fast by a changeless decree,
And round it hath cast, like a mantle, the sea.

Thy bountiful care, what tongue can recite?
It breathes in the air, it shines in the light;
It streams from the hills, it descends to the plain,
And sweetly distills in the dew and the rain.

Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail;
Thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.

O measureless might! Ineffable love!
While angels delight to worship Thee above,
The humbler creation, though feeble their lays,
With true adoration shall all sing Thy praise.

That means we routinely budget ninety minutes to two hours for the trip. Today was good, so we found our way to the lab about fifteen minutes early. The nurse who checked me in was friendly, helpful, and brisk. “Here’s a medical history, this one’s for your choice of music (pick two), and this is an optional customer service survey.”

Music? How unpleasant could this be? I’ve heard of people having claustrophic attacks inside the MRI machine, but this was a new technology to me.

“Just pick one, you won’t be inside long enough for two.” The second nurse had just materialized at my elbow. I was looking at the short list of classical music options and had just decided “Beethoven” probably meant piano sonatas or string quartets – probably relaxing enough. I was about to mark “Mozart” (for short, agressively cheerful selections) when she pre-empted me. Okay, Beethoven it is.

The process is similar to the CT scans I’ve had recently – in fact, the machine turned out to be a General Electric product with the same control panels I’d seen at Johnston Memorial – but instead of tracking intravenous iodine, the PET scan detects a radioactive glucose solution. Fast-growing cells like tumors really suck up the sugar, so the story goes, and if you take a dose of this stuff and lie real still for a couple of hours, the cancers light up on the screen. Melanie, who’s had gestational diabetes, informs me that physical activity makes the muscles more receptive to blood sugar, and obviously muscles aren’t the issue here. Hence, a couple of hours of enforced rest. Dark room, eyes closed, no, you can’t read.

“How much are you giving me?” I asked. Coleen, my nurse, said something like “only 15 millicuries.” She had me lying down on a gurney in a little cubbyhole off the hall, bulky sweater, wingtips and all. Come on, I’m thinking, you’re going to need the arm eventually; I took the sweater off unasked.

“No, I meant how much fluid.”

“Oh, are you on a reduced fluid …”

“No, I’m just curious.” She smiled and said, “Oh, that will depend when I get it.” The radiation is in constant decay so the pharmacist has to calculate the strength of the dosage in terms of time. Coleen returned with a lead-lined tool box and announced “Eleven milliliters.” She had told me it would be an injection; I’d call it more like a 90-second IV. She was good with the needle and I complemented her on her technique.

“I’ve got thirty years’ experience,” she said. I’m thinking that’s no guarantee, though, and she adds, “but sometimes there are problems.”

After infusing the glucose in she added the doctor may want me to do an oral marker as well. I did this at Johnston Memorial last week; they mixed the iodine with orange juice, I told her. “No, we don’t want you to have any sugar,” she said. Duke uses Crystal Lite lemonade, which is pretty mediocre stuff if you follow the directions; add a tablespoon full of organically-bound iodine and you get some pretty bitter stuff.

“You’ll need to drink two of these,” she said, smiling all the while. “Sip them slowly, sometimes they give people diarrhea.” Lovely thought there.

Lights off, no book, no music, though I could watch the passing world through the doorless doorway. It was a good time to pray, meditate, sleep a little. I woke up with stomach growling – did that mean the glucose had hit the system? It was starting to make me irritable, either way. Yep, sugar’s in the blood, and nothing to be done about it. I surreptitiously stretched a few inches.

A few seconds before I buzzed for the nurse, one appeared to announce cheerfully – everyone on staff was cheerful, which was not true in the waiting room – that I could get up, use the rest room, and mosey down the hall to the PET room. Okay, I’m ready for that.

The scanner is a basically a big doughnut; the patient lies on a narrow shelf and slides in and out like a drawer runner. It’s not much different than the CT machine I’m growing familiar with, just thicker. The CT scanner has a rotating ring visible behind a glass aperature. It looks like a chain saw blade when it starts, and I always think of the bad guys tying the hero on the sawmill carriage. Alternately, I think of calculus class, when we did Riemann sums, taking an infinite number of infinitely thin slices of an irregular solid (like myself) to evaluate its volume.

This time we go in head first, and all the way through. Apparently the big machine has both devices inside, because they did another CT scan before the Big Test. (“Hey, did we order that? I’ve already been CT’ed. Gosh, this is going to be expensive.”)

No IV in the arm is a plus. On the other hand, I’ve got both arms over my head, hanging on to handgrips. Can’t take deep breaths. Occurs to me this is how you’d be trussed up for a flogging, but I’m lying down instead. They don’t care about shirts, but pants are bad; I suppose it’s the zipper.

“You can keep on your underpants,” someone had announced. Thanks for small decencies, I think. “You don’t have snaps on them, do you?” No, I’m clean. Thought for another time – maybe if I wore sweatpants …

There’s always this moment of realization in radiology, whether getting a dental x-ray or having your glowing innards sliced a million ways by the Riemann sum machine, there’s always a moment when I realize, “Hmm, everyone else has left the room and taken shelter somewhere. I alone am here to face The Ray.” At least the machine doesn’t crackle, though I admit sometimes the lights dim. (“Well, that’s it, Warden.”)

Ah, there’s the music. What is it … oh, it’s Beethoven all right – the Ninth Symphony. Okay, so I’m waiting to start the 36-minute ride back through the machine, and their idea of relaxing music starts with that slow, building suspension of strings, followed by hammer blows of the whole orchestra. Why not do the whole Stanley Kubrick thing, play “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, the effect is the same. Oh well. The scherzo movement will make up for a lot.

“Is that loud enough?” the technician asks. “A little more,” I request. They’re playing CDs through the single PA speaker on the ceiling. She apologized for the sound quality afterward. “It’s hard to get the volume right on the classical,” she said. Yes, the dynamic range is pretty wide, but I’m not going to ask for show tunes next time either. Walking down the hall, you can hear other patients’ music through the imaging room doors. Mental note: Once rich, donate decent sound equipment to the PET lab at Duke.

I didn’t find the test too confining. Unlike the CT which is done in a continuous pass, the PET scan holds you in place for about six minutes, then advances the table to the next position. You spend about fifteen of those minutes looking up at the inside of the tunnel, about ten inches from your nose, but I’m okay with that; we were into the third movement by that time and I was thinking, the Ninth is a l-o-n-g symphony, how come we’re already this far into it?

So finally I’m turned loose – no results before tomorrow – and walk back to the waiting room. Melanie introduces me to a young father with a cute little girl, about Katie’s age, and wild eyes. Nice guy; he and his wife just discovered, at age 34 and first child, that she has esophageal cancer. She’s getting scanned today too. Very similar story to ours – if she hadn’t had pneumonia, it may have gone undetected. You can tell he’s already been through the wringer and it is about to come across him again. “I’ll pray for you,” he says in a shaky voice when we leave. “I’ll pray for you, too,” I say, thinking in terms of dad to dad, not, as he probably was, as supporter to patient. Obviously, you pray for the patient; but you should never forget the one who brings them to the doctor.

Tomorrow’s the biopsy, starting at 7:15 a.m. for pre-operative check in but not into surgery until 4:00 p.m. I tell Melanie we have to make sure people don’t think this is medical stupidity; this time, we are gunning for available spaces in both departments, and the awkward schedule is simply the cost of securing a biopsy the week before Christmas instead of after. I’ll take it. It will be a long day, though, and no two ways about that.

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Previous chemo post == Next chemo post

This is my first post in the series; I will include links at the bottom so readers can follow the series if they’re interested.

A friend from Colorado sent me a passage from Psalm 107 to encourage me to remember God’s care in our distress. I told him it was doubly appropriate, because this summer we named our new family business from a later section of the same psalm. I had thought at the time that we would probably experience some of this, but admittedly I was thinking “business” rather than “health.”

Psalm 107:23-31 (NKJV)

“Those who go down to the sea in ships,
Who do business on great waters,

They see the works of the LORD,
And His wonders in the deep.

For He commands and raises the stormy wind,
Which lifts up the waves of the sea.

They mount up to the heavens,
They go down again to the depths;
Their soul melts because of trouble.

They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man,
And are at their wits’ end.

Then they cry out to the LORD in their trouble,
And He brings them out of their distresses.

He calms the storm,
So that its waves are still.

Then they are glad because they are quiet;
So He guides them to their desired haven.

Oh, that [men] would give thanks to the LORD [for] His goodness,
And [for] His wonderful works to the children of men!”

John Piper’s essay, “Don’t Waste Your Cancer,” encourages believers to remember that God not only heals our situations, but also places us in them to begin with. It’s all under His sovereign plan and providential care for His children. What a comfort!

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First chemo post == Next chemo post

Dear Friends and Family,

Hal and I spent the day at Duke today consulting with the oncologist and thoracic surgeon. There is a very large tumor behind Hal’s breastbone. It is providential that it is in this site because if it were *anywhere* else, he could not have had a tumor this large and not known it, so we know it was meant to be that we are in this situation. We are thanking God for pneumonia! There is no way we could have known without it. We must trust God that He has a purpose in this situation. We are back to Duke on Monday for a PET scan then Hal will have a surgical biopsy on Tuesday. Because of the location of the tumor, it is going to be difficult to get to. We should have answers the week after Christmas. Please pray that Hal will be diagnosed quickly, that the cancer will not have spread, that it is treatable and that treatment may begin quickly.

As for the rest of the family, it’s pretty tough there, too. When I write all this stuff down, it seems funny it’s so bad Our tonsillectomy patients are pretty miserable and are having a difficult time drinking enough to stay hydrated. My mother said David was crying during the night last night and Susannah was very unhappy this morning.  Miserable just doesn’t do it justice for Caleb. His face and neck are swollen and painful. He is on very strong narcotics and is still in so much pain he struggles to swallow a spoonful of milkshake. Please pray for him. I am feeling very torn – everybody needs me and I
can’t be everywhere.

Everyone else is now sick, including Matthew and me. I keep hoping each day will mean improvement, but it hasn’t so far. The sick ones alternate feeling okay with chills, fever, sore throat and coughing jags.

Hal’s mother has been here since Friday and she will be going home tomorrow, to return next week, we hope. She and my mother have been a blessed help in all of this.

There is good news, though! John Calvin is returning home tonight and is only a couple of hours away. We long to be together with him and are just praying he stays well – I’ll need for someone to care for Katie at the hospital next week!

We are also seeing some amazing things happening in our ministry. A Christian bookstore in Singapore asked us about a month ago to ship them a case (52) of our book. We were worried that she’d have them forever, but last week she wrote she’d sold 40 in the 3 days after she reviewed it on her blog and then the rest shortly thereafter. She asked me to ship her 30 more. I heard tonight that she’s already sold 25 of them and they haven’t even left the states yet! How amazing that God is using our words on the other side of the world!

Finally, it is a tremendous blessing how the people of God have rallied around us. We have received many wonderful meals, paper products, snacks, groceries, and more. The words of prayer and encouragement you have spoken on the phone, in email, on Facebook and Twitter and in person have been balm to our souls and I don’t know how we would have made it through the last few days without them. Thank you so much, dear ones.

What is the best way to hear what’s going on? We’ll be posting short updates on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll be writing about how this affects the boys as well as our philosophical musings and stories here at our Raising Real Men blog. We have also put together a Carepage for those who want to be sure to keep up with what’s going on with Hal. Click here for Hal’s Carepage. You need to click “Become a Member” and establish a password for yourself, but they will not spam you. They will send you a notice when we post an update and that is a blessing to us when we need to get a prayer request out urgently.

Your love and the love of God sustains us,
Melanie

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Refrain

It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

Refrain

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

Refrain

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.

Refrain

But, Lord, ‘tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
Oh trump of the angel! Oh voice of the Lord!
Blessèd hope, blessèd rest of my soul!

Refrain

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.

Refrain
–
Hal and Melanie Young
Raising Real Men: Surviving, Teaching and Appreciating Boys
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It’s been one of those weeks for our family. Actually, it’s been one of those years, but that’s a story for a different time. In the midst of Hal’s pneumonia and probable cancer diagnosis, three of the children recovering from surgery, three of the other children sick and getting sicker, our oldest son still at college for exams, and sickness finally overtaking me, it’s been pretty rough around here. If you know anything about us, you may have done the math on that last sentence. There were only seven children mentioned and we have eight. That’s because Matthew is the last man standing.

We’ve had a lot of support from our church, family, and homeschool group, but on a hour by hour basis, there is just a great lot to be done to keep a family our size going. Normally everyone in the house who can walk pitches in and does chores to keep chaos and disorder (mostly) at bay. What happens, though, when the Lord takes out the rest of the troops?? Why, you man up and do what must be done. It started this weekend, before the rest of the boys got sick. When we discovered that Hal was really sick, I rallied the troops and started trying to catch up in the house. We’d been traveling and things had pretty much fallen apart. We did a ton of laundry and cleaned and straightened and everyone worked their hearts out. Then Samuel and Seth got sick. That left Matthew.

That’s a pretty hard mission, to pick up the responsibilities of a whole bunch of siblings, but Dad is down, too. Matthew really is the last man standing. This was brought home when I was sitting here at my desk and suddenly realized that my teeth were chattering. Dragging my attention off of what I was doing, it occured to me that it was about forty degrees where I was sitting and we had a pneumonia patient and two post-operative patients in the house! I called Matt and asked him to check to see if the flue were open, since I sit next to the hearth. He grabbed a flash light and poked his head up there and said, “Yep, it’s open.” He reached up to close it and a huge piece of metal fell into the fireplace! The flue had fallen out entirely!

After a moment of panic, Matt went up to talk to his Dad. I scooted out of there – it was soooo cold – and decided to visit with Hal for awhile. Before long Matthew came up and you could just tell he was victorious. He was standing tall. He grinned and told his Daddy how he’d figured out what to do, found the tools he needed and fixed the chimney. He may have been proud, but we were prouder. He’d been confronted with a job he knew nothing about and there was no one to help. There was no way his sick Dad could have fixed it in that cold. So he did it.

That’s what men do. They stand in the gap. When they find themselves the last man standing, they keep fighting. They go down, if there’s no alternative, still fighting. God made men to be fighters. To fight against sin and evil and disorder and decay. And sometimes laundry and chimneys.

[The painting is “The Battle of Culloden”)