It's been awhile since we last updated this blog site. Some of you who read this may have picked up from other sources some of what we will share here. The biggest and ongoing concern for us and the entire family is our daughter Barbara who continues to fight cancer. In the last posting you saw a picture of her with her "halo" that was used to hold her head still for the MRI and Gamma-Knife surgery on the small lesion that had showed up in her brain. She has had minimal side effects from that surgery. Immediately after the surgery she had a couple of mild seizures and a couple more seizures as they weaned her off the steroids but nothing since. She is still on 2 anti-seizure medicines.
Here is a recent picture of Barb and her family. Poor Robbie had just woken up from a nap in the car.She started back to teaching for the LA school District as a Special Ed teacher for severely handicapped kids right at the beginning of the school year and has been able to manage that well. She has great staff who assist her in the class room and she has a very understanding principle as well.
This past Friday she went back on chemo as her oncologist wanted to treat the two small remaining lesions in the liver and one in her lungs with a round of chemo to either eliminate them or reduce them in size so that other methods of treatment might be employed. For unknown reasons she had a rather violent reaction to the chemo drugs that they gave her which are the same one that she took for a number of months before going off of them this past April. She was pretty wiped out over the weekend and took yesterday off work in order to give her body more time to recover from the reaction on Friday. Her older sister Ruth was with her over the weekend assisting her and helping to care for the 5 children. Barbara is back in the class room today. On Thursday she turns 40 and her good friend Barbara Cox from Faith Academy days is coming to spend a few days with her. She is off work on Thursday because it is Yom Kippur a Jewish Holiday which is celebrated in Los Angeles.
Prayer requests for Barbara would be 1) That she will regain total strength from the bad chemo reaction quickly. 2) That the reaction will have not caused any serious damage to organs and tissues and that the chemo will actually start to eliminate the three remaining lesions that she has. 3) That she will experience no reaction when she has her next scheduled chemo infusion which will be on the 24th of this month. 4) That she will experience a deep sense of God's peace and protection over her during these 3 months of treatment. 5) Pray for Barbara's husband Erik as he has a lot of extra responsibilities on his shoulders due to Barbara's illness. Pray also for the five children Kiayah, Clare, Elise, Robert and Vivianne. The 4 oldest are all in school but Vivianne is only two and still at home.
The beautiful Routh kids.Joan and I had opportunity to visit her 94 year old mother both on our drive to California and on the way back. She lives in Vancouver, Washington with Joan's sister and brother-in-law. She had not been doing well physically for several weeks now. The doctors can't seem to isolate the exact cause of the problem so treatment has been minimal. Please pray for her and for Joan's sister Judy who is the primary care giver.
In another three weeks our son Tim and his wife Naomi are expecting their son to make his appearance in the world.
Naomi's Mom who works in missions in Mongolia will be coming soon to spend 5 weeks with them to assist Naomi with the baby and to help care for 2 year old Renatah. We are all excited about the arrival of this new little guy. He will make grand child # 12 for Joan and I.Our daughter Amy, husband Jon and their 4 children who reside in an Asian country are doing well. They just had a two week visit by Jon's parents Jim and Jan Holsclaw who are also in Wycliffe. It was a great visit and everyone had a wonderful time. It's always fun for the children to have grand parents visit. We spent a week with them the end of April and 3 additional days in May on our way back to Canada. Pray for Jan who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer a couple of months ahead of Barbara back in 2006. She was cancer free for a time but in recent months her cancer counts have started back up and her doctor fears that the cancer has returned. He will likely put her back on chemo once she and Jim return to Orlando, Florida from this trip they are on to visit all their kids and grand kids.
Our oldest daughter Ruth is settling into her new teaching job at La Mirada High School in Souther California. She is a part of the Art Department with the primary responsibility to teach ceramics and pottery to seniors. She has always had an artistic bent but she started her teaching career by teaching PE at Faith Academy in Manila. Since returning to the US she has been teaching science and math for a number of years at the Junior High level. She is pretty excited about getting to teach something she really loves to do and as she said "On top of that I get paid to do it." :)
Joan and I have been back in Calgary here at the Wycliffe Canada headquarters for 2 1/2 weeks now. It's been a time to get caught up with those things that got set aside while we were in LA although I was able to carry on a lot of my responsibilities by phone, tele-conferences, skype, faxes and the like. Modern communications and technology are wonderful. During our time in LA we were able to put our Idyllwild, California house into escrow which is a bit of a miracle given the current financial crisis in the US housing market. Pray that it will clear escrow on time.
We are so grateful for all of your prayers on behalf of our family and the work that we are engaged in with Wycliffe as we serve the Lord in the Bible Translation Movement. We long for the day when all the world's people groups will have access to God's precious Word in their heart language. Thanks for standing with us in prayer and support. You are a great blessing to us and even a greater blessing to the Lord.
In Christ
Dave & Joan
