mid-week update

Hi everyone,

We are very much in need of your prayers.  Greg is doing well all in all (so much better than over the weekend!) but honestly, he feels pretty awful.  He is experiencing a lot of discomfort and just feels like his body is overloaded with chemicals and medicine.  Obviously he needs all of those medicines to protect his heart from rejection - but they have a huge impact on how he's feeling.  I don't know from personal experience how he's feeling at all, but he describes it as feeling "poisoned" or like he's just being squeezed all over his body.  He's felt this before when he's been on huge doses of various medicine so it's not a completely new experience - just a bad one.  I'm sure many of you who have undergone serious medical treatments understand what Greg is going through.

He is also understandably worried about his upcoming Rituxan infusion on Friday.  Would you please pray that the steroid (he takes it tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday) would be effective at completely eliminating the headaches?  Greg said he'd be content with dealing with headaches if they were minor and didn't require him to be hospitalized - he is so so tired of being in the hospital.  Each time he's there over night takes a toll on him.

And overall, we're just both feeling very disappointed still about this summer.  We have been working so hard for months to move forward and set goals and believe that it is possible for us to make plans and be able to go through with them.  This summer represented a fresh start to us in our minds, so the impact of being stuck at home due to rejection and being hospitalized over and over again is pretty big.

And of course, being honest, this just brings up a lot of fears that we have about the future.  How will this impact his heart long-term?  Will he keep rejecting like this?  Will we ever get more than 6 months without a major medical problem?  I am working really hard to discipline my mind and not dwell on these worries, and God has certainly taught me a lot about only focusing on today - because today is all I can handle.  So I hesitated to share those worries here, but I need to be honest that this is not a cake-walk and we are struggling.

We would really appreciate your prayers for the remainder of the week.  I'll let you know how things go on Friday.

Thanks so much,
Elise