3/26-28/10 Friday-Sunday
I show Teri some new
postures. Teri continues her 3 X 20
minute walk. After Ben arrives from San
Francisco, she asks him to go on her usual high speed walk around the condo with
her. He has to sing, do theraband
stretches, hop and skip as he walks behind her – all the things Teri does – as
if he were a imprinted dutiful baby duckling.
She is very happy he is home with her.
We get an e-mail that Rachel now has a prune instead of an olive ...
sized. Life grows on.
Toby our stuffed poodle
(real life Toby died of cardiac failure Christmas eve 2008, mother Coco of
melanoma in August 2007) disappeared in the hospital. Teri was distraught. After we got home, they called and said he
was found in the laundry – I picked him up.
Because we didn’t know if Toby would be found, I ordered another stuffed
poodle, and she arrives in the mail.
Teri now has a stuffed, snuggly Coco and Toby and she is restored.
At Friday’s appointment,
Teri’s white blood and platelet counts are falling. She receives a growth factor to stimulate her
white cell production and shorten the neutropenic phase. She will likely need one blood transfusion
and two platelet transfusions next week.
We discuss the therapies.
Difficult statistics. Difficult
choices. There is 40% mortality with a
bone marrow transplant due to nonengaphment (the new stem cells don’t take over
properly) and bone marrow complications.
The best survival is a matched sibling donor, the numbers decline for a
matched unrelated live donor and umbilical cord blood. For the latter, which is our current choice,
you need two units and we only have one identified. If there is only one umbilical cord unit, it
has to be amplified under a special protocol at one of a few places (not
Milwaukee) and requires a 3 month stay at that institution. The other choice is to do four rounds of
chemotherapy and wait and see what happens with a huge overhanging cloud of
relapse.
Teri is proactive and goes
on a Saturday and Sunday frenzy of calling and e-mailing friends and acquaintances. There will be about 10 bone marrow drives
throughout the U.S. that feature her which are sponsored by the Asian Pacific
American Medical Student Association (70 total chapters) that B founded in
1995. She considers advertising and
paying a donor in China. She thinks
about interacting with the local media.
She thinks about twitter and You tube to bring people into the bone
marrow drives. She talks to friends who
are in marketing and a well known author for advice. She gets a Chinese teacher from Taiwan to
help translate her message into a Chinese word document. She thinks, she acts.
Teri’s insight has been
sharpened in the heightened moment. She
tells me that she loves my “principles” and believes it has led to differences –
since she is more outcomes oriented – in our mutual responses to the same
events. I think this is great
insight. I also tell her I love her
energy and spunk and that otherwise, I would become a work hermit tied to my
computer. She wants us to see a highly
recommended psychologist Dr. F. to improve our relationship in this challenging
period, to address some communication baggage, and to help me deal with some
gut-checking responses to stress left over from my early childhood. The first session goes well. We read Bernie Siegel MD again.
Colin my colleague and I
have Sunday brunch. He faced
disseminated cancer some years ago and recently wife Harriet completed her
multiple rounds of chemotherapy and surgery.
Wow, two senior GI people with two spouses with cancer! We talk about how to face the future. We talk about potentially changing
careers. We talk about the taking care
of our elderly parents. It is tough.
Buckeyes lose in the sweet
16 by 3 points. They were dominated
inside and lacking a strong big man, just couldn’t stop Tennessee’s inside
game. Boo hoo.
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