Hertzler Outpost

Cathy Getting #3

Ironically it seems the cancer center is where Cathy feels her best lately. Her potassium levels were low this morning, so she didn’t get one of the chemo drugs and had a better time of it overall. Or it just might be that the stronger anti-nausea meds she gets there work better.

The last month has been non-stop nausea for Cathy which has meant hardly any eating and lots of work to get the minimum amount of drinking. In fact, she has had fluids injected by IV on several days to keep her hydrated.

This morning the nurse told us that this is no way to live and that they would work to improve Cathy’s situation. So Cathy’s treatment protocol will change and hopefully give her some relief from feeling so badly.

This morning the nurse also explained that what we thought would be the end of chemo treatments after #4 would really only be a short break while they do some scans and determine if they’re working. If they’re working, they will likely resume to make a total of 6 to 8.

Cathy at MD Anderson

Today is chemo #2 of 4. We are hoping today goes better than last time, and we think it will. It took about 10 days before the nausea wore off from the first treatment enough for Cathy to resume eating, but we think the new mix of drugs on tap today will improve that. She’s eating Pringles even now as I’m writing this which is a huge improvement already! Thanks for your prayers. They are a big encouragement to Cathy.

[5:00 pm update. The day went really well! No nausea or other problems. Cathy said she feels as good now as she felt after 8 days of recovery after last time. This was a big emotional boost for her, too. Thanks for your thoughts and prayers!]

Yesterday brought Cathy and me back to the familiar 5th floor of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Orlando. Sometimes familiarity makes things better and sometimes it doesn’t. Some things were familiar and welcome, like the lunch cart and fresh, warm cookies, but some things were new and unwelcome. The new mix of chemo drugs gave Cathy some severe nausea and was definitely not welcome.

But drugs on drugs helped fix the nausea, and Cathy was able to finish the infusion. This one was a pretty negative experience, though, unlike the first round of chemo last year.

As before, the infusion at the hospital is followed by two days of home-administered infusion with a carry-along pump. I think Cathy might return to the land of the living sometime Friday night after it gets disconnected.

We are so grateful for everyone who is praying for her!

First Mobile Pastor Training in Cameroon

Saturday morning marked the launch of the first mobile phone pastor training in Cameroon. About 20 people came for an orientation session and, if ready, to purchase their “PTL smartphone.” (PTL = Pastors Training in Leadership). Ernest, the technical coordinator for this program in Francophone Africa, set up this launch in his home city, Yaoundé, Cameroon. Zarc, my coworker from Nairobi who is the overall tech coordinator for this project, and I traveled there to help Ernest get things going and to see how things are working on-site.

Ernest, the PTL Tech Coordinator
in Francophone Africa

Getting phones and memory chips here was a non-trivial task that took many months. The phones are almost too expensive already without import tariffs, so our African leadership has chosen to avoid adding on any other costs and hand-carry batches of phones to the various countries. Keeping these two critical ingredients (phones and memory chips) in sufficient supply will be a challenge here.

Cameroon is a bilingual country (French and English), but I think Zarc and I were the only two other English speakers in the country besides our “Campus Pour Christ” coworkers. My bad high school French confused just as many people as it worked on. And half the time my fading Hungarian would come out, and I couldn’t remember if the word I just said was actually Hungarian or French. This didn’t earn me any smiles.

It is good to be heading home!

Cathy begins chemo treatments soon, and I am traveling on Mother’s Day today. So this trip was expensive in more ways than one. Cathy assured me the trip would be OK, and her sister came down for a visit while I was gone. But I will be happy to be home.

Tuesday afternoon at the beach,
the day we found out

It looks like Cathy will be resuming another round of chemo soon. Last Tuesday we learned that a spot on her lung which had appeared in one of her routine follow-up scans is, indeed, cancer. It is colon cancer in the lungs, as apposed to lung cancer, so this is apparently better. Her oncologist prescribed chemo treatments every other week for two months and said he is very hopeful that it will respond well.

Cathy had been fearing the worst when this spot became an issue, so the news on Tuesday was actually a relief. An afternoon trip to the beach and a few days of adjusting have really helped, too. There are no difficult decisions left to make for the next two months, so we will take one step at a time and trust God to walk us through this. Cathy is familiar with this type of chemo, and it’s not too bad with minimal hair loss. So there are a few things like this we are grateful for in the midst of this news.

If the spot responds well, there is the possibility of removing it completely, at which point Cathy would be cured of this one. That is what we are praying for. This isn’t the path we would have chosen for ourselves, but we trust that God knows what is best for us. We would be so grateful for your prayers as we begin this next phase of treatments.

Several years ago one of the evangelistic websites I was working with, EveryStudent.com, developed a great way to interact with its visitors on Facebook. And then two months later Facebook changed things and rendered this great new social media strategy useless.

Social media sites are bad places to give exclusive control of your content, a point emphasized by Steve Raquel of IOV Media in a seminar today at Cru on how to maximize the impact of your online communication. One of the principles he emphasized was the need to control your content. That is, don’t give exclusive control of your content to Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or any other social media site. Instead, post your content on your own website (like hertzlers.com) and use social media outlets to attract attention and draw your audience to your website where you retain control of the content.

In an effort to heed this advice I installed a plugin on my blog that allows me to push blog posts to both Facebook and Twitter.

Now I just need to start writing more ……

Curt, Jerry, Jim, and Andrew
at the Gulf of Mexico

Cross Florida 2013 (170 miles) was fun this year. Starting from Cocoa Beach on the east coast of Florida with an east wind, 60 F temperatures, and a group of 14 friends from the Eastside Cycling Club, it was a lot easier than last year and, in many ways, more fun. These were the three I finished with, Curt, Jim, and Andrew.

A colleague of mine produced this video, one of the best visual descriptions of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Who will win? Jerry vs. Squirrel

Andrew and Jerry biking on Andrew’s 21st birthday

Living in Orlando means December is a great time to be outdoors. Andrew and I spent a few hours mountain biking on nearby trails on the afternoon of his 21st birthday. This was my first time trail biking as an adult, but Andrew is a pro. It was a fun time and a great workout.

1. Hospitals are not places you want to stay in long.

2. My wife is really strong.

3. I won’t understand why. I don’t know why God blessed us so much during this cancer year. I thought it was supposed to be terrible. Sure, it was difficult at times, but we have had friends who brought us meals, an organization that gave Cathy space to go through this treatment without pressure of losing her job, a team of ministry partners who gave generously and prayed endlessly, and the team I work directly with filled in on things I couldn’t do because I couldn’t travel.

4. I didn’t miss traveling like I expected. A year of being home each weekend and riding with the Eastside Cycling Club has made me a stronger rider and introduced me to new friends. That has been fun.

5. Cancer puts it all into perspective. Health isn’t the most important thing, our souls are. And we prayed far more for the health of the souls of our children than we did for the health of Cathy’s body. And we’ll keep praying.

I suspect God has at least five more things for me to learn this coming year, too.

A month after her surgery, Cathy has been steadily recovering, but this recovery period has been the most difficult of the last year. Radiation and chemo were difficult, and recovery from her major surgery to remove the tumor (November) was difficult, but this last month has topped them all.

Getting her digestive system working again has been the problem. She hasn’t been able to stray far from the bathroom for any length of time.

We had a second visit with her surgeon yesterday who confirmed that things are, indeed, improving, and we gained a lot of information that should help put things into perspective for Cathy. We keep praying for her recovery to a somewhat normal life again soon.

Cathy has been home from the hospital three days now, and each day is better than the previous one. She has a great attitude, but she knows the recovery road will be months long.

Andrew moved back home recently to start auto tech school, and Audrey is staying at home while she starts classes at the local community college. So the house is full and is a welcome distraction to the otherwise difficult recuperation process for Cathy.

We continue praying that her recovery goes well, but there are still a lot of unknowns. And we are grateful for the peace she has, knowing it is from God.

Today’s surgery marks the end of a year-long cancer treatment road for Cathy. Right now (12:00 Orlando time) she is under the knife, and while the surgery’s outcome is not too uncertain, life from now on is. Last November’s surgery to remove the cancer was successful, but today’s surgery to put the rest of the “parts” back together will make it apparent what kind of quality of life Cathy will experience. We are praying for God’s grace and peace as she recovers and adjusts to a new normal.

Audrey graduated!

Audrey graduated this morning, with honors, at the Amway Center in Orlando along with over 700 of her Timber Creek High School classmates. We are proud of her, and she is happy to be finished with high school. She and some of her friends are spending the rest of the day at the beach.

Next fall she will be taking classes at Valencia Community College on a Florida “Bright Futures” scholarship, working toward a psychology degree.

No news is good news. I just realized how little I have posted about Cathy since near the end of her chemo treatment. Perhaps this is due to the fact that chemo wasn’t as hard as we anticipated!

With the end of chemo came a sigh of relief and a celebration of not having to go to the chemo floor at the MD Anderson Cancer Center again. Ironically though, it came with other unique challenges. Rather than all things coming to a nice peaceful end, this phase has generated more doctor’s appointments. They’re all good appointments…making sure Cathy is cancer free, healed, ready to go. But more appointments nonetheless. It’s also been a strange time of greater energy…thus thinking she can be very productive again…but realizing it’s not quite working like that. This phase requires a ‘new normal,’ and it’s taking a little time to learn what that is.

Campus Crusade for Christ announced its intentions to change its official US name last summer, and the plan was to make this official sometime in 2012. That change happened last week, and our US organization is now named, Cru.

Cathy and I are part of a group that reports to a global vice president, so we are part of the organization that will retain the name, Campus Crusade for Christ.

Confused? Don’t worry, either name will work in the US.

The 167 mile Cross Florida Ride looked like a suffer-fest to me, but instead the event turned out to be really fun. The hills were challenging between miles 120 and 150, and we had a west wind (5-10 mph) all day to ride against, but I was able to ride in a group the whole way and avoided bike breakdowns, cramps, and overheating. I actually felt better at the end of this ride than I do on many Saturday morning group rides of one third the length. We finished the course in 10:00 hours, including stops, but our rolling average speed was 19.6 mph. My heart rate monitor said I burned 11,200 calories.

I would ride it again next year.

On April 1 I am attempting to ride my bicycle across Florida in one day (Cross Florida Ride) with some friends from the Eastside Cycling Club. From Cocoa Beach to Weeki Wachee Springs (east to west), the total distance will be 170 miles. I expect the real work to start at 120 miles where the route gets hilly.

You can track the progress of our group here. It’s in real time, but you’ll have to refresh the page to see updates.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

Easier viewing:
http://www.instamapper.com/ext?key=1902577887064436155
http://mobile.instamapper.com/ext?key=1902577887064436155 (mobile version)

Although Cathy hates them, each of her chemo doses have been mostly routine. Today was no exception. She’s exhausted and laying down now. She will have no energy this week, but if this week is like others, on Sunday she will bounce back again. 6 down, 2 to go. Thanks for praying for Cathy!

Tour de Cure – near halfway

Today I finished my first cycling century, a 100 mile ride. I did a fund raiser for Tour de Cure, the American Diabetes Association event to raise funds for finding a cure for diabetes. Several of my extended family and friends live with diabetes, so I was happy to do something productive and fun at the same time.

At the 52 mile mark my tire blew out. Had it been the inner tube, I would have been back on the road quickly, but I wasn’t carrying a spare tire. So I called for the repair truck and was back on the road 60 minutes later and $60 lighter. I was also taken back 7 miles on the course route to the repair truck, so I resumed with a greater challenge than I had expected.

Fortunately for me, one of my Eastside Cycling Club friends also had a mechanical failure, so he was just getting his chain repair finished at the repair truck as I pulled up for my tire repair. We were able to ride the remaining 55 miles together.

After the event, my friend, Jim, who helped organize this event, starting working on me to do the Cross Florida Ride April 1 (170 miles). We’ll see.

Cathy left the MD Anderson Cancer Center today amazed again at how good she felt. They made another adjustment to the combination of chemo drugs she gets, and it left her with greatly reduced side-effects. She is still wiped out tired, but that is much better than wiped out and horrible side-effects. This last phase, chemo treatments, have been a welcome answer to our prayers!

On Wednesday two events marked a new era for our mLearning project.

First, we had the launch event of a major new version of the software we have been using, Allogy Digital Press. This new software will make it possible for non-technical people to publish their own mobile learning course for smartphones or tablets.

The second event was a planning meeting where the 8, or so, member mLearning team identified ten projects that are either under way or in the developing stages.

We are now out of the initial development stage of this project and into a growth stage. I’m excited about what this new phase will bring!

One of the side-effects of the type of chemo treatments Cathy is getting is an annoying tingling feeling in your fingers when she touches anything cold – like you get when you wake up in the middle of the night and realize you’ve been sleeping on your arm. Cathy had ten days of that tingling after her last session. Funny, she never complained about it, and I never knew it until she mentioned it to the chemo nurse last Monday. She just figured it was normal.

Ten days is too long, the nurse said, so they eliminated one of the chemo drugs that causes that issue from this round. This was the drug that has given her the most difficult side-effects.

As a result, Cathy felt pretty good this week during her third round of treatment. She had more energy and didn’t have the tingling and cold-sensitivity from previous weeks. This was great!

She is helping to plan a big church event this weekend, so the timing was good. She had energy to work on making the plans happen. Granted, she has probably over-done it, but the fact that she had capacity at all is amazing. She is grateful at how God has answered everyone’s prayers for her so far.

Cathy expected her chemo treatments to get progressively more difficult, but this was not the case for dose #2. This time Cathy had a better understanding of how to use the medications at her disposal to keep the usual nasty chemo side-effects at bay. So Round 2 ended up going better than the first week. We are really happy about this! We recognize that God is allowing this to be less difficult than it could be, but either way Cathy has continued to experience God’s peace and patience in this.

We are so grateful for everyone that has been praying for Cathy. The sense of peace she has had in this is truly a gift from God.