Waits and Measures

They say that “time flies when you’re having fun” and I can assure you with great confidence that the obverse is also true: “time drags like a drugged snail pulling an anvil uphill when you’re having no fun whatsoever and help help help get us the hell out of here.” And what that phrase lacks in style, it makes up for in veritas.

Kathy is doing "well" in the sense that she can and has felt even worse, but that's about as high as the bar goes. It's been two weeks since she completed (most of) this round of chemo, but the "good" blood numbers aren't coming back yet. White Blood Cells: 0. ANC (a healing factor in the blood): 0. Her platelets are very low and all borrowed - she gets a bag or two of them every day. After her previous chemo session, her platelets didn’t come back at ALL, which is what landed us in the hospital nearly two months ago.

She's very weak, though did a little moving around out of bed for several days now. A couple of jaunts from the bed to the door and back, and then a walk around the bed to sit in a chair for an hour (and yes, sitting in a chair is hard and exhausting).

Her doctor came by Wednesday morning and answered a few questions more directly than usual. He said her odds of actual recovery are "very low. Not zero but very low." Additionally, when we ask if she's still a possible candidate for a stem cell treatment, we get a real "it's not impossible, but it's not likely" vibe.

Everything rides on the blood numbers at this point. When Kathy's good blood cells start reproducing again, the goal will be to get her healthy and strong enough to go home for a couple of weeks (perhaps after a short stay in a rehab facility here in the same hospital), after which she'd come in for another 5 day hospital stay and chemo in hopes of finally getting into remission. After that? Who knows. Remission is an unpredictable thing which could last a year or more or just a couple of weeks. On the other hand, if it's the bad blood cells (called "blasts") that start coming back in earnest over the next few days, then it's likely that we'll be looking at palliative care.

Which, it turns out, simply means managing and slowing symptoms rather than trying to cure the disease. I'd always assumed that palliative care simply meant giving a dying person opiates to ease their passing. And that can be a thing too, of course, but it's not what we're talking about at this time. We hope.

A vaguely positive development is that I’ve established somewhat better lines of communication with the doctors and hospital staff to try to get some freaking questions answered. And I also took the opportunity to wage a few complaints about issues you’ve already seen documented here. Good idea? Bad idea? I genuinely can’t tell the difference anymore.

Everything now rests on seeing what Kathy's bone marrow does when it starts to recover (which gets harder and harder to do after each round of chemo - and she's had four major ones now - which is why this current wait is so agonizingly slow). As always, your hopes and prayers for those blood numbers, Kathy, and our little family mean the world to us.

FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE

The doctor just made his mini-visit to the room. He said another bone marrow test will be done on Monday, the results of which will determine whether continuing on this treatment path has any point. So yeah, our weekend is off to a flying start.

HITTING MY CRAZY BONE

It only seems fair that I try to find and share a little humor with you, though the pickings around here are slim and mostly weird. Still...

• When talking to our doctor’s second-in-command about communication issues, I realized that whenever I told her something the doctor had said to us, I was doing it with his Indian accent. I apologized when I realized I was doing it; she kindly said I did it very well. Which is true. Maybe I should grab a stethoscope and start giving second opinions around here.

• A funny thing I’ve noticed is that if you walk to your car carrying a cardboard Starbucks cup and shortly thereafter walk back from the car carrying the same cup, nobody wonders if it was only empty on the way to the car.

• It turns out there are no movies or TV shows that you really want to watch when Life gets this scary and crappy. So in the evening, Kathy and I turn on Youtube videos (mirrored to the television) with beautiful nature scenes and relaxing music. Which is pretty soothing until you remember Edward G. Robinson’s final scene in “Soylent Green.”

• The difference between a Duck Call and a Nurse Call is that sometimes ducks come.