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Showing posts from March, 2012

Surgery Success

Dear Praying Friends,      Thank you so much for your prayers. It took about an hour for the surgery and everything, including the outcome, appears to be a great success. yesterday, we went into town for the final pre-op appointment so we stayed with Cheyenne. At that office visit, the doctor explained some of the procedures to greater detail and questioned Ann at length. He explained that the radio frequency would NOT be used to cut, but rather was inserted like a needle which would vaporize a  hole inside the area. As that area heals, it will shrink because of less material inside. He reduced the soft palate, the area around the uvula, the back of the tongue, opened the passages in the nose and straightened a deviated palate. His record of success in these cases is 85%. He told me HIS expectation for the surgery was to remove one and possibly reduce the second medicine I take for high blood pressure. He feels that we have wrongly assumed that my problem was high altitude (partially

Special Prayer Request

Monday, March 26, 2012 Dear Praying Friends,       I have an unusual request for prayer today. I (Gary) am scheduled for surgery on Thursday at 8:00 AM. Unusual ?? Yes, two ways. I have only had one surgery, for my gall bladder removal in 2008. I am not one who searches for the opportunity. Secondly, the whole circumstance around the surgery is unusual . Several of my family members have asked at varying intervals, "When are you going to have the doctor check out your snoring/breathing?" When I had the incident last February with the lungs, it was brought up again. So, I asked my cardiologist for a recommendation concerning my sleep problems. I went to the doctor who checked me out physically (ears, nose, throat) and suggested a sleep test. No surprise there. However, I agreed so I could see him tell me that my problem was so minor I need not apply even for a CPAP. I took the test, eight and one half hours of being wired to the machine, but at least in the privacy of m

Saturday, March 10

     WOW. Where do I begin? Yesterday appeared to be a regular day with a normal day's activities. A little before Noon I met a friend for lunch and a chance to run some errands. Traffic was heavy because it was Friday but everything else seemed normal. We left the plaza and my friend insisted he would take me all the way home (about 20 miles); I noticed a column of black smoke off in the distance and commented, "Something's on fire." I kept telling him to just drop me off at any of the bus stops and I could hop a bus home. As we neared the half-way mark, traffic began to stop completely. I again begged him to drop me off and he finally agreed (he had previous engagements that he needed to make).      I boarded a bus within four or five minutes but we could see that basically no one was going anywhere. Suddenly the traffic started moving again and I realized we were crossing the median to run down the other side of the highway. It is a limited access highway, so once