One Day At A Time

We are now taking it one day at a time...
Well after five days of being home, we are starting to adapt to life outside of the hospital again. The first couple days were rough because we had to basically re-train Kelly again to get up out of the bed and into the wheel chair regularly. Having Edna (live in home care help we hired) has helped me out quite a bit with cleaning, cooking, and working with Kelly. While she was in the Hospital last week she did not get up out of the bed, this was basically the reason she ended up with a blood clot in her lung. My goal is to try and get her up out of bed as many times as I can in a day. Each day seems to get a little better as far as getting her up goes. Yesterday I got her up at least 5 times! Yesterday was a good day, we had our brain chemo appointment that went fairly well. We did find out that Kelly’s white blood cell count is down again, which means we had to give her the nuepogen shot which helps get the counts back up. We also found out that Kelly’s blood got a little too thin based on the blood tests we took. So now we don’t have to give her the Lovanox shots (blood thinner) for the time being, just the pill form (Coumadin). Yesterday I was also able to get Kelly a newer hospital bed, one that has a button to raise it up and down mechanically. The old one was very old fashioned; it had a hand crank which we turned to get the bed up and down. I also got the Dr to prescribe an air mattress and pump which should help with some of Kelly’s back problems. So in terms of our days, yesterday was a good one. We are just trying to take it day by day. Actually we break the days into two parts, Day time and night time. Once we get through the day, we try and get through the night. This seems to work for us and keeps things in perspective. If we look out much farther than that, it can be overwhelming. We have talked to Heartland Hospice out of Monterey and they are going to come out and talk to us about services they offer and how they might help our situation. I told them we are not giving up this fight yet and that Kelly has a negative connotation with the term Hospice…but they assured me over the phone, going on Hospice does not mean the end but only help and guidance as to what to do in tough situations. They also will provide much needed support in the way of pain management for Kelly and also help with her high level of anxiety. Kelly is still having a hard time at night so this might be a really good resource for us. Hopefully they can help us even though we are still fighting and on chemo, so we will see how that goes. Our schedule looks like this, we will continue to receive brain chemo on Tuesdays and Fridays and every other Tuesday Kelly will receive her systemic chemo (chemo that works all over the body). After a few more weeks of chemo we will run some tests to see if it’s working or not. We also are hoping the brain chemo is working, the latest findings in the fluid have shown less malignant cells then when we started but since the sample sizes are so small it’s hard to tell at this point. Thank you to everyone out there for all the prayers and support. A big Thank you to the Dinner Delivery group & to Jan Holthouse for continuing to let us borrow the van for transport. Take care and god bless. Manny & Kelly