Status Quo on Tykerb

Julie is learning what combination of medicine she can take and not get sick.  We figure her tykerb is the most important, so all the other stuff like antibiotics, have to play second fiddle.  But, it has been a few nights since she threw up, so the strategy is working some.

Julie stays tired all the time and goes to bed early most nights, 8:30 pm or so.  She usually wakes up around 8 am and listens to the weather and her tv shows until lunch time or after.  She gets up in hte afternoon and comes down and watches tv.  Lately, she has been going out to the yard for an hour or so, and even mowed the front yard sitting on the tractor last week.

We have gone to neigborhood parties yesterday and today.  We stayed a couple of hours, which did Julie in, and then she came home and slept.  She said, half kidding and half serious, that I was flirting with Tina, a long-legged sister of Jody, who was throwing the party.  I thought I was just staring and drooling.  Tina is taking care of her mom who has Alzheimer's. She was telling me about the guilt she is feeling thinking about putting her mom in a nursing home.

headed to NY after Mother's Day

For mother's day, Allison came home and brought Julie a bag of peanut butter and a card. Olesia called. I took Julie to see Star Trek and a fancy meal .
 
Julie is making steady progress in recovering from radiation, but her stomach is uipset a lot from the tykerb. I suggested we look for some  pot, but julie doesn't like the idea so far.I will leave for NY for the week tomorrow. I think Julie will be  tired but ok... feel free to give her a hand.

Julie has a doctor appt tomorrow am, I will blog from there. (I didn't.)

Julie's MRI and Life

Wonderful Julie, May 1, 2009 

We are at the doctor's office to get the results of Julie's MRI of her brain. Waiting, usual stuff. 

While we wait, Julie is having problems with acid indigestion. Hausford, her oncologist, prescribed nexium, but the insurance company said she didn't need it that zantac was enough. Perhaps, the radiation doctor, Dr Shah, will also prescribe it? Waiting, more on the next email blog.  Nope, he said Dr. Shah said Dr. Housford had to deal with it.

At lunch with Julie. Bran scan came out great, only very small spots of cancer found. They are hopeful that even these spots will disappear. They said her cancer is so fast and aggressive that it reacts / absorbs radiation readily. Anyway, good news. On the downside, she has infusion of liquid into her inner ear and probably needs a small operation to have tubes put in at least her right ear. Yea, no more swimming this year for Julie. She will see an ear eye nose doctor next week . The week after, I plan to go to Olean.  I am losing touch with work / Dresser-rand.  They are going nuts with new programs and initiatives to monitor our progress on everything.  I could not work in the office there anymore, even if it was not in Olean.   Too much emphasis on maintaining crappy systems and too little on actually accomplishing something.

Well, I just got word that FAFSA, the government loan agency did not approve Olesia for college loans this year.  Money that I took out to pay medical expenses and to help pay college expenses for both daughters from  our IRA, about $40K, counted as income this year.  That pushed over the government limit on income to receive government loans.  If I can't talk FAFSA out of this then I will have to take money out of my IRA for her college this year and then I will be over the limit again next year.  I am in the government downward spiral game.  Life sucks sometimes, especially when the government is involved. 

Back to topic. I think we have to start calling Julie the Come-back-Kid.  I have seen her twice this last year when she looked like she was weeks away from losing the battle.  Both times she has come back with the help of aggressive treatments from her doctors.  The downside is that I think I have aged five years in the last year.   I know what depression is for the first time in my life both for myself and Olesia.  

Olesia spiraled out of control when she came up on spring break and saw the effects of cancer entering Julie's brain.  Julie had just fallen because she was losing motor control and vision from the cancer.  Julie's face was puffed up from the steroids and her hair was starting to fall out again.  Olesia saw that I was struggling with it too, and it was all too much for her handle.  I didn't know it, but she went back to college and stayed in bed for two weeks.  I found out about it when she called me in hysterics (is that a word) when she was due to be in a debate but had not prepared.  Her A in the class was turning into an "F" and she couldn't do anything about it.  I asked her to take the train home.  She got half way and ended up stuck in the Baltimore train station.   It is not in the part of town that a white man wants to travel through in the middle of the night.  But, we did and we survived.  She is now on more drugs and seeing a psychatarist  again.  The bottom line is that she went from all A's and B's to one "F" and the rest still above C's, perhaps still A's and B's.  I have not talked to her about being ineligible for school loans. 

One of the good things to come out of the crisis is that Olesia may have found the second passion in her life, biology.  The first passion is Theater, or acting.  Well, she went to a major test in biology last week.  She had only read like 4 out of 13 chapters and she went to the test with the expectation that she would fail.  She called me after the test and was confident that she had at least a B and maybe an A.  It turns out that she reads about the environment and evolution all the time on her own, via the internet.  She was surprised that the what she had learned on her own reading, and what she remembered from Zoology from high school.  The test was on all the things she cares about.  Her primary concern is that she has to take a lot of math like Calculus.