A President's Weekend

We'd like to tell you we flew to Vancouver and watched Apolo Ohno win his 6th Olympic medal or we saw Hannah Kearney take the freestyle skiing gold away from the Canadian, Jennifer Heil, gold medalist from Torino. Or we sat in the stadium to watch Shen and Zhao grab the gold for pairs figure skating. But, no, the best we could do was TiVo a zillion hours of coverage and then patiently watch the events unfold. I try not to look at the day's results because not only is NBC running an "evening summary" program, it starts here in California at 8PM, long after most of the events have completed and medals awarded...and three hours after they show it on the East coast.

The weekend was quiet for us, again. Mary is simply living in a narcotics cloud. There are several phases to the cloud. The "light fog" phase is the closest to Mary being totally normal. During that phase, she can carry on a conversation and is very lucid. It is while she was in the light cloud phase today that she asked me to get some attention on her situation this week even before we get to the scheduled appointments. I should note that closest to being normal is nowhere close to being normal. Her coordination is off, her balance is questionable and she is prone to spilling food or drink easily.

I call the next phase "30 minutes after sunset" because its clear things are getting darker and more difficult for her to navigate. In this phase, she is clearly unable to focus and also unable to recall from her memory. In between doing household choirs, I join her in the bedroom for a few minute break to check up and see if she needs anything. During one of these breaks, TiVo was showing the downhill racing course with the athletes plunging headlong at incredible speeds. She was telling me we were watching cross country skiing--which we had watched earlier in the day. It took several minutes of carefully explaining the difference before she recognized it was downhill and not cross country skiing. Normally, she not only knows the difference, she has memorized both courses and their key features and turns.

Another example, I was working paperwork at the dining room table while Mary was watching the Olympics this afternoon. She walked out to the dining room (risky, but not too bad) to ask me how to get the TiVo controller to make the program go backward and forward. We have had TiVo for six years now and its been the very same controller that entire time. I explained it to her and she said she understood. (For those who don't have TiVo, its left arrow to go back and right arrow to go forward.) This is consistent to an incident that happened when MaryR was here last week. The TiVo-TV combination was not working. They ended up calling me at work and I talked them through it. As MaryR said, it was pretty simple but Mary insisted on calling me to get the proper instructions. And, Mary has solved that very same problem herself many, many times--changing the input on the TV from DVD player to the TiVo DVR.

Mary's final phase is "Listing 30 degrees to port." In this phase, her head droops to her left (aka port) and she is only able to concentrate for a few seconds at a time. Her eyes glaze over or completely close as if she is sleeping. A characteristic is that she will latch onto a topic and it may come back repeatedly for 10 to 15 minutes. In this phase, she will enunciate the topic by suddenly speaking in a loud voice although its typically only the first few words of a sentence before she falls silent. In a moment, she'll start the same sentence again, falling silent at about the same point. She will repeat the first part of the sentence multiple times adding a word or two with each attempt. Once in a while, she will finish the sentence and then apparently come awake for a moment or two before drifting off again. The topics can be anything from an announcer's phrase during an Olympic event to something we discussed during the day.

What is causing this? Well, we still don't know the source of the pain but the source of this behavior is the narcotics. Light fog is the result of the transdermal patch. The other two phases appear as the result of the amount of morphine she takes and she takes morphine when the pain becomes extreme a.k.a, breakthrough pain. Today, the pain broke through starting late afternoon into mid-evening. I gave her the prescribed, allowed doses of morphine but it took multiple doses over several hours before the pain was under control. By then, it was "Listing to Port" time again.

Yup, Stanford is going to hear from me in the morning. This is not living.

One last thing about the blog hijacking. One of the first things I did was change the security procedure on the blog. Now, if someone mails an entry to the blog, it is held until I approve it. And, because the blog address has been changed, the spammer/hijacker is sending his stuff to a non-existent address. Finally, unlike my previous attitude, I have not posted the "send an email to the blog" address and probably will not publish it--although I will send it to you if you ask.