Dear CCAM Partners and Friends,

During the past few days, Buntheep has been recovering well from the first surgery. She can sit up or walk around for short periods with supervision. However, if she does too much, she tires easily and often experiences headaches, dizziness, and nausea. On the other hand, as long as she rests in bed, she does not have any pain now.

The doctors still do not have any definite plans for the next surgery. But the preferred plan is apparently to wait until after the holidays. The radiologist, who will hopefully assist doing the embolization, is back in town. But the pathology report is still not back from the lab. However, it is the Lord who ultimately controls it all according to his perfect plan.

In any case, while the human medical team members decide on their plans, our all-powerful God has not ceased to work more miracles!

Yesterday, Buntheep said that she could see the light that was flashed in her right eye during vision checks. She also said that she could see shadows moving. But during some checks she could not see anything. When asked to follow the doctor's finger up, down, right, and left, both eyes could respond in all directions. Before leaving Cambodia and until the past two days, she could not move either eye to the right at all. Of course, she is still blind in the right eye, but apparently some improvements are beginning to stir, even though the doctors say that she will always be blind in that eye, since it has already been such a long time in darkness. Let's see....

The biggest miracle is the comeback of the left eye that had lost about 1/2 of its vision...staying continually blurry and only able to focus on large things held close to her face. Yesterday morning, when Buntheep reported that her left eye could now see clearly, I brought her Bible and asked her to read John 9 about Jesus healing the man born blind. She read the whole chapter without any mistakes while holding the book at the appropriate distance from her eyes! I got my English Bible, which has very small letters. I pointed to different sized letters and asked her what they were. She could identify every one of them, even the tiny ones! When the doctor came, I reported this to him, and he had Buntheep whisked off to the eye specialist (who was also a member of the surgical team) for testing. Her tests with all sorts of machines confirmed what we already guessed...Buntheep's left eye now has 20/20 vision and all of her periphery vision has returned!

I asked the eye doctor if the return of vision in the left eye was medically expected. She said that it shouldn't have happened. She surmised that maybe it was caused by the steroids Buntheep is taking to reduce inflammation in her head. Now they are taking Buntheep off the steroids to see if the eye loses this improvement, thereby proving that the steroids caused the eye to improve! She said that so little of the tumor was removed during the first surgery that it could not account for the improvement. Besides they were mainly trying to save the sight she still had, not really expecting to regain any of it. I wonder if the Lord Himself may not be shrinking the growth and gradually taking more and more pressure off the optic nerves, while restoring the damage already done, just as many of us have been praying!

Whenever the doctors get around to doing the next surgery, the main medical problem is that the growth is wrapped around one of the main arteries connecting the heart and the brain. Please pray that this giant growth will shrink in size and recede from entanglement with the artery (or any other important areas), making it possible to remove all of it. Or maybe the entire growth will just gradually disappear by God's power in the meantime! Pray also that Buntheep's right eye will experience the same miraculous perfect vision like the left one!

Thanks for all of your encouraging emails and especially for your prevailing prayers! Getting time to do email is a continuing problem for me, but hopefully later on I will be able to correspond personally with many of you again.

In His Hands,
Gioia and Buntheep

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