July 4

Hello to all. A quick update from the Bertus household. Mark continues to rock along. He is hurting quite a bit still and requires Percocet to keep him functional through the day. He is slowly tapering off, but gets way too much pain to go without it. He is still having trouble in the urinary department, but luckily we still do not have the catheter back. We pray that things will start to recover soon. It is so frustrating for him. The wound is really starting to heal up and the 2 open areas are much smaller now. That is definitely something to cheer about.

Mark's activity level hasn't picked up a lot yet. He is still mostly in bed or sitting in the chair. His weight is down 27 pounds now. His appetite isn't great and his ileostomy is a constant battle. The ileostomy comes from the small intestine. They did this to allow all the areas they had to resect and suture back together to heal. The problem with an ileostomy is that all of your fluids are reabsorbed in the large intestine. Mark is not currently using his large intestine, so he loses a lot of liquids through the ileostomy and can easily get dehydrated. We have to constantly push fluids to keep him from becoming dehydrated. They say that most patients with ileostomies end up in the hospital from time to time with dehydration. We are now at the point where the ileostomy can be reversed and Mark should be able to avoid the dehydration issues once the reversal operation is done. We will have to get tests done to make sure all the suture lines are healed and there are no "leaks" in the intestines before they will do the surgery.

I have been a little down recently with all of these issues going on. Thursday I received a card from someone at work. She handed it to me as we were talking about Mark and I know that I must have sounded somewhat negative with all of the things going on and the frustrations we're feeling. After our conversation, I opened the card and felt awful for thinking negatively. The card said it all. "Don't tell God how big your mountain is, tell your mountain how big your God is." I think that will be my new motto.

We had an okay 4th. Mark really didn't feel good and wasn't up much. He did get up for a short while and made an outing to Sam's with me and his mom, but he started feeling uncomfortable quickly and was ready to get home. He planned to make it out for fireworks but just wasn't feeling well and stayed home. The kids and I went outside today and played some. Emily got a new Princess bike and enjoyed riding it through the neighborhood and Colton was playing on his new Ripstick. Brent took the boys out to hit golf balls on the driving range this afternoon, so overall I think we had a good time.

We continue to pray for Mark's body to heal. We need to quickly get this next surgery behind us so we can move forward with the chemotherapy. Waiting too long is not recommended and we want to give Mark every opportunity to beat this awful disease. Keep praying for healing and strength. God bless!!!!