Mary's family arrives today

Pick up for Daniel is 3:45PM at San Jose and for Reenie and Tom its 4:30 at San Francisco. Depending on how Mary feels, she may join me at San Jose with a 2nd car and take Daniel home. We'd like to do that because he is recovering from surgery on his foot and I am pretty sure he won't be feeling good after two plane flights and a change of planes in Phoenix. And, although we have three cars--if you can call a Honda Element a car--they are all limited to four passengers.

As for Mary, its been a couple of rough days. Her rate of bloat has stopped but she is uncomfortable--bloated. She is now back on the two diuretics she has been on before and we know those work. As Mary said, it takes about 36 hours and then the flood gates open--if you get my drift.

The switchover from painkiller #1 to painkiller #2 has not been smooth. Friday morning she took #1 because the prescription was not available yet. In CA, a narcotic requires a script obtained from the doctors office--no phone in or email allowed. Mary picked up the script during her run to Stanford for the x-ray. But, she ran out of energy and did not deliver it to our Walgreens during the day. I took it down and waited for it after our takeout dinner from Willow Street. Mary insisted I pick up dinner before fetching the painkiller. Her tummy needs the presence of food to avoid undue pain. Mary has become a "grazer" in order to make sure the stomach pain doesn't roar in on her. And, I had left work a couple of hours earlier than normal (5PM instead of 7PM) on Friday to make a Costco run.

On Saturday, she was still feeling the effects (stomach pain) from #1 and feeling pain from the bloat although her weight has been constant for three days. She hasn't taken #1 since Friday evening when I brought #2 home. We did run errands but in the middle of shopping at Lunardi's, she hit the wall. I took her out to the car and she waited there while I finished the shopping. She never really recovered so we did Chinese take out last night.

As for the back pain, painkiller #2 is doing its job. I could tell for the simple reason that after dinner last night, Mary continued to sit in the chair at our breakfast bar. For the past week, she is out of that chair and back in her lounge chair or in bed because of the pain of sitting up for the time it takes to eat.

Mary is still asleep on Sunday morning as I write this so we don't know what today will be like. We do know that her sister, Reenie, is here to be Queen of the Kitchen and, more importantly, to provide additional moral support.

How is Devil Dawg, you ask? Well, given everything else going on, we can't say we've observed anything new. She does demand her chewsticks after meals but you've seen those clips. Oh, and Costco had a sale on lint rollers this week. While there on Friday, I picked up the package of 5 rollers. Now, each of our guest can have their own lint roller to remove white dog hair!