Thoughts

A lot of you sent notes and commented on what the doc said yesterday. He didn't say anything we didn't already know and, in fact, he's been extremely careful in what he says all along. They can mechanically ventilate her lungs but they can't make her blood cells oxygenate. She's fluid overloaded and dehydrated at the same time, which is caused by the disease itself. They give her albumin and lasix but then her albumin goes low again and she pools fluid. Her sodium is too high so they typically give fluids but they can't give much because she's already fluid overloaded. If her sodium gets too high, she'll seize. She still isn't making any blood cells. Her liver function is better and she's tolerating the feeds but this doesn't fix her lungs. Everyone comments on her "fight" and strong will. Most people wouldn't have survived the first pleural effusion, much less the second, but she's still fighting.

We've always made the best of a bad situation and tried to live as normally as possible. 3 days before Adrienne went into the hospital, we were walking around Santa Barbara with the dogs. A week before, we were in Chelsea Market in New York and running through the street to go see "Julie and Julia." She was ready to start classes the day after she was admitted and wouldn't let me drop them until she'd been here a week and she knew she wouldn't catch up.

The problem is this f--ing disease, the so called good cancer. It was manageable until late last year and then it totally changed character, growing out of control. We just don't have good enough drugs and chemo sometimes just makes things worse. Adrienne always took it in stride, much more than me, confident that there would always be something there for her, that things would be okay. She wants to live as much as anyone I know. No one here is giving up but we aren't the type of people to bury our heads and pretend this isn't happening. More than anyone, I wish they could fix her and life would just go back to normal, that we could go out to dinner and a show, watch our favorite TV shows with the dogs, just be ordinary.