2/26/10 Friday
A quiet day. We spend part of the day preparing food for her – fresh-made (by Terri) rice congee (juk, xi fan) comfort food fed to all Chinese everywhere when ill made with fresh-made chicken broth. We are very careful to boil everything extralong as part of Teri’s ‘neutropenic’ diet. She drinks Ensure plus and Boost Breeze for additional protein. Her white cell count is unchanged. Her K+ and Ca++ continue to be low and require IV ‘chasers’.
Cards pour in. A quilt, a comforter and a gaggle of books arrive – we now have a veritable library of excellent and/or uplifting literature. She is finding her reading attention span is dulled and it is easier to watch TV – Laverne & Shirley (set in Milwaukee) DVDs sent by Peg & Rhonda. A quilt and a comforter arrive among packages.
We bring Dad to visit and eat dinner. Teri with her congee and the Terri, Dad and I fueled by sumptuous chicken soup from Sandy. We do another video chat with former neighbors Cindy and John. We watch Apolo Ohno. Teri tires easily and elects to call it an early night. This is part of the nadir.
2/27/10 Saturday
Teri’s rash continues to be blazing red and coalesces into a large strawberry patch. Fortunately it looks worse than it acts. She has generalized edema swelling especially in her legs that is tight to the point of discomfort. She has accumulated 12 lbs of edema.
Dr. C. gives us the bone marrow aspiration/biopsy report. Her blasts are down but not to the %’age that qualifies as a complete remission, BUT given the background hypocellularity (lack of total cells) it may represent a reduced absolute number of blasts and a remission. The next bone marrow aspiration/biopsy will tell.
Steve & Ray drive over from Madison and provide energy, laughs and support. She spends most of visit while in bed. The TV was focused on the earthquake in Chile and the tsunami headed for Hilo, Hawaii – where Ray’s daughter-in-law’s family and son Mark and daughter-in-law Marianne currently live, respectively.
We get Chinese take out from Fortune – Dad’s favorites – Seafood Soup and Ho Fun (rice sticks). Teri had chicken matzo ball soup, chickencongee and tofu.
Before he leaves for Phoenix for a meeting tomorrow, Teri asks me to review his medications. It’s a challenge because there are multiple generic forms of the same drug so I have to use a pill ID from Epocrates to identify all the different forms – I find a series of errors.
2/28/10 Sunday
Teri calls us in the morning and wants Japanese cold noodles, B’s agedashi tofu, Memee’s special chicken congee, and Steve’s special chicken matzo ball soup. What could be better than Chinese and Jewish dietary penicillin, working together! Terri Lin and I run around as Teri’s personal sous chefs to bring her own specialized meals on wheels. We are happy she can now eat real ‘soft’ food, and that her appetite is returning.
Ruthanne visited from Madison. She treated Coco, our mother poodle, when she had melanoma two years ago. Anna, her mother & Kok Peng (former fellow resident) also visited from Madison and brought a Asian fusion (Momofuku) cookbook with glossies of sumptuous mixes that has us all salivating.
The APAMSA students want to feature Teri nationally in their upcoming bone marrow registration drive. Anita (sister) has discovered a Buddhist nun-initiated Taiwan/Singapore-based bone marrow registry of 280,000 and a China-based registry of 1,000,000 Chinese.
No comments:
Post a Comment