A Leaf on The Tree

Today is Infusion #3 and marks the halfway point of my chemo treatments if all goes according to plan. I'm waiting for the nurse to stab me and then poison me, but I've already had my blood pressure checked along with my pulse. Both OK if a little high. I also received the results of blood tests done on Wednesday and overall things look ready to go for today's infusion. The number Juli and I and the family always want to hear is the PSA number. As you may recall, PSA means Prostate Specific Antogen, and it is a way of measuring how actively the cancer cells are growing. Normal for most men is something like 0 to 4, mine was 26.1 when I was diagnosed. Two months ago I was started on a quarterly Lupron injection and 30 days later my PSA was 0.8, an excellent and even emotional result as it indicated that the cancer was being very responsive to that treatment. After another 3 weeks it had gone down to 0.5, and the results that came back today show another drop down to 0.3...

When I was 10 years old, Lester got blue paint on my dad's brand new car. Lester was my best friend and our next door neighbor. He was a year younger than I, but we did all kinds of things together. His family was into motorcycle racing, trap shooting and bird hunting, plus drag racing. I was into bike riding and running away from my 8 sisters - the very ones who always blamed me when my brother David and I got into trouble as if it was never David's fault for anything. Lester and I thought it would be really cool to build a go-cart, but we didn't have access to things like engines, steel tubing, and a welder. (If my dad is reading this over my shoulder from Heaven, he must have just shuddered at the thought of 10 yr old Dannie with a cutting torch!) So Lester and I made do with a handsaw, a hand drill, some boards and nails from our old porch, and some lawnmower wheels Lester's dad had sitting around. We cut the porch boards to consistent lengths and nailed them to...

My view today is of blue sky and palm trees, and I’m listening to bees buzzing in the orange tree behind me, fragrant with blossoms, the high-speed wings of a hummingbird fanning the air near me as she races a three-dimensional figure 8 pattern above my head with an occasional hovering pit-stop. A couple of doves noisily chase each other from one address to another in some kind of avian argument as to which neighborhood has the best schools, hospitals, and shopping centers, escrow for a nest being imminent according to Mrs. Dove's latest visit to the Lady Bird doctor, and a 2 foot long gecko has climbed halfway up the fence just a few yards away. The gecko is a bronze colored metal sculpture Juli and I picked up in the Dominican back in February, but everything else is real, so wonderfully, beautifully, God-I-worship-you real. So peaceful on this Palm Sunday to be outside, nadir nearing the end as my body regenerates the blood cells killed off by the chemo session a week ag...