Back from Spring Break

By all accounts, Adrienne had a great time during her week off, sleeping in, shopping all over Santa Barbara. She even learned how to knit. She and her friend arrived back at college on Saturday only to find out that the dining hall wouldn't be open until Monday. Luckily, the village is close by so she and the other earlier arrivers could get something to eat. Now she's back to the routine of classes, work at the Kravis Institute, ballroom daning, Straight But Not Narrow...sounds like a pretty good (though sometimes stressful) life.

Adrienne's right hip is hurting her quite a bit. She says each step hurts and sitting is also painful. As I recall, that hip was worse than the left prior to her surgery in December. The more advanced the avascular necrosis, the less likely that the core decompression surgery she had will work. I've made an appointment for her to see the orthopedic surgeon in May and have a call in to find out about pain relief in the meantime. Since she's now taking the cardiac medication, we may need to be more careful about pain killers that can cause clotting problems.

City of Hope called the other day to say that our insurance won't pay for a PET scan until the CT is done. This is a new policy, obviously designed to minimize the number of very expensive PET scans done on patients. For Adrienne, it just means extra visits to the hospital. So, she'll have the CT on Friday this week and probably the PET the following week. She sees the cardiologist on Friday too and he will probably adjust her meds. The extreme fatigue she felt the first week is gone but may return as the dose increases.

I spoke to the doctor running the clinical trial we were interested in. If Adrienne is still in remission with these scans, he doesn't want to do it because he doesn't want to take the risk while she's doing well. These types of treatments work best when someone's disease is under control but, on the other hand, we don't want to upset the apple cart while Adrienne is doing so well.