Early yesterday afternoon I ( Scott) was discharged from my latest stay at the UCSF Hospital.  This was stay #4 of 4 scheduled visits to receive methotrexate chemotherapy and kill the cancer invastion in my central nervous system. 

It was a pretty good hospital stay, all things considered.  The methotrexate cleared my system in record time, so I was only there 4 days.  I tolerated the chemo quite well, some near-diarrhea and poor sleep being the only bad side affects.

We continue to be wowed with the care we receive from the UCSF staff.  Beyond just being good quality from a bed / patient standpoint, the expertise is outstanding and we are very confident that this crew knows what they are doing.

The next step for me is “consolidation”, in which  my immune system will get knocked down to nothing before the harvesting of my new stem cells begins.  We are expecting a meeting next Tuesday to determine timing of the consolidation effort, which could start as soon as September 10.  Once that effort begins, I should be in the UCSF hospital for a long 3-4 week stay, so that will be a new threshold in endurance.

Recently we had photographer extraordinaire Peter Thomsen do some family portait pictures.  Here’s two links for those of you who want to take a look.  An excellent 60 second slideshow:

http://peterthomsen.com/slideshows/halverson/

and ALL the pictures for you diehards:

http://www.printroom.com/ViewGallery.asp?userid=peterthomsen&gallery_id=1242224

I’m so enthused by the pictures as they reflect God’s goodness in the lives of my small family. 

Thanks again for your prayers and partnership!

Love,

Scott, Lynne, Daniel and Becky

Sorry for the long delay in messages.  For the last 6 of 7 days, I (Scott) have been having difficulty with occasional vomiting.  I know I’ve dropped another 8-10 pounds – I’m telling ya, this is the best weight loss plan!  Fortunately, I had a stretch right before this most recent illness in which I felt really great, probably the best I’ve felt since February or so, and I’ve really learned to jam the food down during those times when I’m feeling well.  So , all in all, I remain around 10 pounds below my basketball playing weight.

How to interpret these recent swings in health?  Well the extreme good health probably indicates that the chemotherapy is doing its job, killing the cancer in the central nervous system.  There’s been several theories about the vomiting, but the most prevalent seems to be that I’m reacting to my last chemo treatment at the nadir period, well known as 7-9 days later.

So as I write I am in UCSF hospital, and have had (today) my 4^th of 4 scheduled methotrexate treatments.  I will probably get to go home by Wednesday at the latest.  Then, after that, I come back (anywhere from Sept. 5 to 15) for the first of the big guns: 7 days straight of heavy duty chemo in which they kill my immune system (in prep for harvesting stem cells).  Scary stuff, and we will need your prayers more than ever at that point.

How are Lynne and I and the kids doing emotionally?  I’m doing pretty well.  There are days where I get overwhelmed if I think 3 months ahead to all that I’m going to go through with stem cell etc. and then I realize that I just can’t think that far ahead right now.  Lynne is doing well, chin up, but truly exhausted.  The thought of school starting this week is overwhelming for her.  The district has promised certain help with some of the home school guidance Lynne normally takes on and we will need this to pull it off (otherwise we may need to pull the kids from school this semester).  The kids have good days and bad days; the street of life has a hard edge to it when your Dad has been deemed to have 50/50 odds by a leading oncologist.

So that’s where we are.  We continue to fight this thing with all we’ve got, and I’m becoming a fanatic about doing right by those things I can control: rest, exercise, hygiene, diet.  We feel very good about our chances of beating the odds.

A real highlight this week was hosting our friends Conrad and Kimberly from LA.  They are each in their own ways experts at cancer (Conrad having buried his parents to the disease, Kimberly near to completing her Oncology nurse practitioner degree at UCLA) and are an invaluable source of information to us right now.  Unfortunately they had the misfortune to visit right when my vomiting was at its worst but that didn’t stop them from enjoying time with Lynne and the kids. 

Thank you as always for your kindness and prayers!  You help us so much.

Love,

Scott, Lynne, Daniel and Becky

Welcome to the 232^nd edition of “Update on Scott’s health” (well, it feels that way anyhow!).  Thanks for caring so much that you want to keep up on my situation and pray.

Where we are in the current treatment regime is the 3^rd of 4 scheduled chemotherapy sessions (before they fire the heavy guns at me in the Fall with more intense chemo and stem cell transplant).  Usually these sessions take 4 days to get through, but this time it looks like it will take 6.days.  We lost a day on the front end as it just took a while for the hospital red tape to come undone and let me get my chemotherapy treatment.  And we’re going to lose a day on the back end as I just missed the cut off point with my blood count; I had to have a .10 count of chemo still in my system, and I scored a .11.  So, for you prayer warriors, you could pray that my next count goes under .10! Once it gets under .10, I can go home.

A real highlight today was a visit from Dr. Kaplan.  Dr. Kaplan is the Director of Adult Lymphoma for UCSF and a very busy man.  Turns out it was his turn to “do rounds” in the hospital (a cool thing about UCSF is that even when you reach Rock Star status like Dr. Kaplan they still expect you to do some “little things”).  Anyhow, it gave him a chance to review my response so far to the UCSF chemo treatment.  He says he is pleased with how I’m responding, particularly noting the improvement in vision.  This was a real boost to Lynne and I as Dr. Kaplan is the expert here, and he’s also the architect of my treatment plan.  He’s also the guy who deemed my odds 50/50;  hopefully the odds are a bit improved now that Dr. Kaplan is “pleased”.    

I’ve had a couple of very encouraging days health-wise.  For many weeks (months?) now I haven’t been able to sit up due to nausea, but I’ve had 2 days in a row now of sitting up!  And I’ve been doing a lot of walking on the hospital floor.  Lynne and I figured out last night that it takes 12.25 trips around the hospital floor to equal a mile worth of walking!  (Yes, the numbers geek livers) So yesterday I did 12.5 trips, and it looks like today I’ll hit 17 or 18 trips.  Sounds boring I know, but such is the stuff of days locked in the hospital.  When they hit me with the killer chemo next month, I’m likely going to be throwing up a lot, and will lose weight and muscle mass.  The more weight and muscle I can put on now the better off I’ll be when the pounds come off.  I’m now around 10 pounds below my basketball weight, and only 20 pounds over what I weighed as a High School Senior. 

One last really cool answer to prayer needs to be mentioned.  One of our difficulties has been that my care is in San Francisco, but we live in Santa Cruz..  The hospital won’t allow squatters, so Lynne must find somewhere to sleep.  We have some good friends that have provided housing to Lynne several nights, but often they are traveling and so the connection is hard to make.  So we’ve been praying for housing.  Anyhow, through some amazing connections (the Dad of Becky’s camp counselor 7 years ago.  Thank you Cheryl Taylor for putting this connection together) we’ve heard of a small cottage owned by San Francisco Covenant Church.  This cottage is reserved for families of people who have a loved one receiving medical care in SF.  The church has (aside from one 2 week stretch) reserved the cottage for Lynne’s use the rest of this year!  It is only a 15 minute drive from here.  We have had many evidences of God’s goodness through these many months of fighting cancer, and here is another one!  And it is a neat connection to my past, as I grew up in the Covenant church.

OK, I’ve probably taken advantage of your kind listening ears for far too long now, so I will sign off now.  Lynne and I can’t say this enough – thank you for your kindness expressed to us in so many different ways.  Each of you that read and pray are truly carrying us through these dark days.

Much love,

Scott, Lynne, Daniel and Becky

Hi y’all, just a quick update from Scott & Lynne.  Today was a big day for us as we celebrated 23 years of marriage.  There were times this year we weren’t sure I would make it this far so it was a special day indeed.  We went to our favorite restaurant (the Shadowbrook in Capitola) and each of us had spectacularly good meals: an Alaska Salmon for me (Scott), and Steak and Scampi for Lynne.  One of the great benefits of this disease right now for me is that the doctor wants me to eat as much as possible (as I figure to lose a lot more weight during upcoming treatment), and I managed to obey that directive pretty well tonight!

Health-wise, I’ve been feeling really pretty well these last few days.  For instance, I haven’t taken anti-nausea medication for 3 days; probably the last time that happened was about 2 months ago.  Lynne and I are enjoying this season of improving health. 

On the treatment schedule, Tuesday Lynne and I journey again to UCSF for an intrathecal (spine) shot.  That’s an outpatient thing, but it will pretty much take all day.  Then Friday I check back into the hospital for my 3^rd (out of 4) methotrexxate chemotherapy treatment, which will probably mean 4 days in the hospital for me.

And tomorrow my Mom and siblings are all coming down from Seattle for a quick 24 hour visit!  This will be a great encouragement as I missed out on seeing all of them at my Mom’s 90^th birthday bash.

Finally, Lynne and I received a real boost this past week from Dr. James Dobson’s monthly letter.  With excerpts from his book “When God doesn’t make sense”, Dr. Dobson mined the scriptures and said:

×      We’ve got to separate the evil / hardship we’re experiencing from the fact the God is good, faithful, redemptive.  Yes, there is evil and hardship – but this doesn’t change God’s goodness.  This point in particular was really helpful for Lynne and I as we contemplate the “what if’s” in my 50/50 prognosis.

×      We’re not supposed to figure all this out on our own: “Lean not on your own understanding”.

×      Instead, we need to walk contentedly with God, trusting him for our future despite the present hardships.  Yes, this sounds simple, but Christ told us that we can’t walk with him unless we do it as if a little child.  What is more child-like than holding your Daddy’s hand while the storm rages around you?

×      God does go silent sometimes.  “It is to the glory of God to conceal a matter” wrote Solomon, while Isaiah 45 says “Truly you are a God who hides himself”.  I appreciated the reminder that it is part of God’s nature to go silent sometimes, as this was happening to me of late. 

These reminders were hugely comforting to Lynne and I, and I hope an encouragement to you.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to “be still and know that I am God”.  I think the reality is that many of us in our culture only know “be productive and know that I am God”; that’s certainly true of me.  There is a profound set of comments on this topic on the previous blog entry from our friend Shelly  Lawrence, if you want to jump-start your own thinking on this.

We love you, and thank you for your care, prayers, cards, and phone calls.  You have gifted us in so many ways.

Love,

Scott & Lynne, Daniel and Becky