Waiting

We are both looking forward to switching to the neurontin from the narcotics. Mary's brother in law, Tom, has been on this stuff for a year because of a cyst in his spine. His side effects were minimal, with a clear head and normal functions except for the "butt stuck in the chair" problem. Neurontin does not make you an invalid, it just makes you want to sit rather than get up and do something. Mary and I would gladly trade butt in the chair for clarity of mind and simply not being on narcotics.

I called the oncologist this afternoon and left a message asking if he concurred on the medicine switch and if so, how could we get it started? No response yet, but I will call again tomorrow. I talked to an acquaintance who's spouse works at Stanford and tenacity is the best approach now to make sure Mary doesn't get lost in the crush of work. I will be tenacious!

Otherwise, Mary is generally out of it most of the time because of the narcotics. She woke me at 5am today asking for a morphine dose because of the pain and we had to follow that several times during the morning hours. Either the pain is knocking her down or the fentanyl-morphine combination is keeping her down. She has a few hours each day where "I feel fine" can be heard, but reality is that simply means the pain is gone for the moment, her tummy is stable and she is awake. Her mind exists in a narcotics cloud and neither one of us likes it. For example, we just spent 5 minutes navigating on the TiVo screen and she couldn't connect scroll up or scroll down with the right button pushes.

The scary part today is that "she felt fine" while I was fixing her breakfast. She came out to the kitchen to help. She was puttering around and all of a sudden she tried to grab the counter. I managed to get to her before she did a face plan into the floor! I walked her back to her lounge chair, she is far safer there. I am glad she wants to help and by inference, not be be so sick. However, she is sick and I hope she doesn't do herself in.

As for me, I saw my dermatologist last week and she took some biopsy sample from my face and they all came back negative--good news! She did tell me to constantly use wide brimmed hats in the sun--my red Irish skin is simply too susceptible to skin cancer.

Tomorrow I see my ophthalmologist which will, I hope, soon set up my cataract surgery. I desperately want that surgery done. We postponed it from May of last year because of Mary's surgery. Now, I am in dire need of getting the lens replaced in my right eye because it has progressed to to point of significantly impairing my vision.