Here We Go!

Well, here we go. This is my first post in this blog I started well over a month ago. My intent was to blog often but...well....that just hasn't happened. Life over the past month has been quite stressful to say the least.
To begin with we honored our children's Christmas lists and bought them a puppy. A little, white, hypoallergenic, non-shedding puppy which, by the way, we named Max. I know the name is not too creative but I had a cat as a child named Max and dearly loved him....so hence the name...Max. Anyway, we bought a puppy. We had our eyes on this one for awhile. He was used as a therapy puppy in a nursing home and then sent to the pet store. Now before I get ridiculed for succumbing to a pet store puppy mill puppy, Max was in some ways a rescue to us. Since he was a little older and larger than the tiny new puppies, Max had spent four long months in a cage within the pet store. The kids and I came in week after week to look at puppies and low and behold "our puppy" was still there. We felt bad for him and seeing him became a ritual that took place weekly. We told the kids we didn't have enough money to buy the puppy but when my parents offered to help us purchase him we humbly obliged and Max became our pet. We purchased him on a Sunday....Sunday, November 16th. Matt, me, all five kids, and my parents were present.
On Tuesday, November 18th, two days after bringing home the puppy, I received a phone call from our doctors office concerning Matt's test results from a recent ultrasound. We had written off bad news since nearly a week had passed since the exam. After answering the phone I heard the famous, bad news is coming soon, words....."The doctor would like you BOTH to COME IN and get the test results". Nothing peachy ever comes from those words when they're spoken related to medical test results. I remember asking the nurse....I think it was a nurse....if she knew the results and she replied, "no". Just, "no".....I knew she knew it was bad news but couldn't tell us anything.
After meeting with the doctor later that morning, Matt and I were told he has testicular cancer. I had a feeling something was wrong which is why I urged him to go to the doctor for a physical...I urged him for years! When we received the results I knew he had harbored this for awhile, maybe five years or more, and had a huge possibility of having a serious form of this cancer and possible spread to nearby lymph nodes. However, this was not a time for an "I told you so".
Matt and I were now faced with five children and a new puppy that all needed our attention when all we wanted to do was retreat to a quiet place and think. Think, plan, and pray....that's all you can do when you receive threatening news like cancer. Albeit testicular cancer has a high cure rate but it's still cancer.....I almost capitalized the word cancer.....like it deserves special treatment for just being cancer!
After the diagnoses of cancer, Matt was in surgery two days later and within five days informed that the cancer was a seminoma type cancer. Seminoma basically means a slower, more contained cancer.....thank God!!! After blood work and CT scans we were told there is no visible spread BUT radiation treatment is still advised. Matt will start 20 rounds of radiation therapy the week of December 22.
Through it all we are deeply thankful to God that Matt seems to have a great prognosis and much more life to look forward to. I got to thinking.....God says He will never give us more than we can handle but sometimes I wonder.....I wonder what His definition of HANDLE is.