The Asher Update

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June 25, 2005

June 25, 4:30

asher passed the night without incident. his blood oxygen level was a little lower than it typically has been and his heart beats per minute was up for most of the night, but i think it is because he has night and day confused right now. he rests much more peacefully in the day. he also did not need any pain medication last night, which was really wonderful.

until gloria and hadrienne relieved me about 11 AM this morning, he was really having a very good morning for the most part. he dozed off and on, and he also continued to lift his head up, but with increasing frequency as well as determination.

in the night, i am positive that he said a few distinguishable words, but he is still not able to do that on demand. when his physical therapist came in this morning she rubbed ice on his feet to see if he had any reaction to cold, and he moved his toes (primarily his big ones) on both feet. he even, for the very first time, turned his right leg so that his foot was pointing straight up instead of to the side like it had been.

several nurses from ICU came down to see how asher was doing just before i left. it was so wonderful to see the care and attention they gave to him while they visited. it was like watching mothers care for their own child rather than nurses caring for a patient, and that is the kind of care that asher has been getting from all his nurses since he came to the hospital. not to make you think that all his nurses were women. asher has also had many incredible male nurses who have treated him like they were treating their own sons.

i also want to share a story about something that one of the icu nurses that came down told that happened to her son yesterday. she has a ten year old son, who is a skater, and she had already told us that since she first told him about asher that now he asks about him every day and also prays for him. well, yesterday, he had her drive him around in order to hand out fliers about the skate competition to benefit asher july 1st and 2nd. she said every time they passed a kid he would make her stop the car so he could get out and give he or she a flier. whle they were doing this they stopped at an ice cream shop so that he could give out some more fliers. he took one of the fliers up to a kid that was going inside the shop carrying a stack of CD's. when he gave him the flier the kid told him that he already knew about the competition and that he was taking around his CD's to try and sell them for a dollar a piece in order to make enough money to pay the entry fee for the competition.

the evidence for all the prayers that are being offered keep showing up in ways and means that are so overwhelming that i don't even have the vocabulary or the intellect to be able to properly express what i want to say even about not knowing how to express it. it just seems that gloria, hadrienne and i are in a perpetual state of awe for the things that are undeniable evidence of God's mercy and grace at work as a result of all of the prayers that are continuing to be offered up.

i was just thinking about a movie that came out a while back, called "hope floats." i never saw it or even have a clue as to what it is about. but from where i am sitting right now i can tell you that hope more than floats. hope retores life, even raising those from the dead, both spiritually and physically.

one prayer request that i very hesitant to mention is one involving a transportation need that it looks like we are going to have. i had a leased car that ran out june 13th and had to turn it back in. i had already decided that i wasn't going to get another car for awhile, one because there just hasn't been any time to even think about it and 2 i had decided that there were just too many more important needs that should be taken care of first with the widows ministry than my having a car. so, i was in the process of getting our 1966 volvo sedan running so that i could drive it for a while. this would have really been fine with me to drive, but now that we are going to atlanta on monday, this just isn't going to work for us. in part, because it still is not drivable, and the other reason is that it just would not be reliable enough for me to commute back and forth to atlanta. gloria and hadrienne will be staying down there all the time, but i am going to have to live between both places, at least initially.

i also really feel like i need to leave a car for hadrienne and gloria and the only other reliable car that we have that we could do that with is hadrienne's car. so, the plan is to take them down there on monday and leave hadrienne's car with them and i am going to come back and make arrangements to get another car so that i can travel back and forth.

this is just another in a long list of needs that i know will be worked out, i just have to be able to find the time to do it. with everything moving so fast gloria and i haven't even had time to hardly sit down and talk alone for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time in over a month. very thankfully, we are going to get to do that in just a little while. God has gifted us with an incredible provision for that be able to happen. in fact, i really need to end this now so that i can make it in time to meet gloria at the hospital.

continuing to give thanks with all of you,

andy mendonsa

| By Andy Mendonsa | 04:32 PM

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Posted by: Rebecca Tredway at June 25, 2005 05:47 PM

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