One More Thing

In my family, we have a tradition at Christmastime called One More Thing. After all of the gifts have been opened, someone yells, "One more thing!" and brings out another gift. Many times, it's the biggest gift of all. I once gave my wife a puppy as a One More Thing.

Many times, there has been more than one One More Thing. After the first, someone else would take up the call. There might even be a third or fourth One More Thing. Not often, but it has happened. So in that spirit, this post has a few One More Things.

See, I'm getting into the Christmas spirit. Finally. We watched three Christmas movies one day last week. You can do that when you're retired. Die Hard, Babe, and The Polar Express. If you don't think Die Hard and Babe are Christmas movies, it's your loss.

This past week has been a little rough for me, emotionally. I'm sure you could tell that from my last post. Among other things, we had company scheduled on three different occasions, and all of them had to cancel. None of the cancellations could be helped, and we certainly don't blame any of our dear friends for having things come up that were beyond their control. But it made for a difficult week for me.

My wife and I have spent many Christmases alone, just the two of us. Since we didn't have children, and we moved away from our families decades ago, we've developed our own traditions and generally spent Christmas at home by ourselves. But last year, and now this year, that's started to change. We don't have anyone coming over for Christmas Day this year, but we do for Boxing Day. And there are other friends who will visit during the week between Christmas and New Years. Since my diagnosis, I find I need people around me more than I used to. I have to pace myself, but I need to be with my peeps too.

One more thing. My next PSA test and Lupron shot are scheduled for January. I'll talk more about treatment in a future post, but things seem to be going well at this point. That's reason to be thankful.

One more thing. Three months after having seen the metastasis spots on my spine show up in that bone scan, I still have no pain from them. I'm thankful for every day that's pain free.

One more thing. God is good. I keep saying that I'm getting closer to God, and it's true, but it's not like I'm inching closer to him each day on my own. No, he's revealing himself to me. It's like he threw a big door wide open and he's just showing himself to me. Not really telling me anything, just showering me with his presence. It's indescribable.

One more thing. Thank you for reading this blog. It means the world to me. I hope it's an encouragement to you. If you're a cancer brother or sister, I hope you can relate to my journey. I hope I speak for you in some small way. If you're reading because you know me and are concerned about me, I hope it helps to give you this window into what it's like. I'm gonna keep on writing it for as long as I can.

One more thing. Merry Christmas! #waroncancer