The Masked Father

I recovered sufficiently today to feel able to visit Kay. So I drove across to Nijmegen to see if I would be (medically) welcome. The rules were that I had to wear a mask and had to confine myself only to Kay's room, which was all fine by me. The result was that Marion got the afternoon off and went to the McD house to have a sleep and a decent shower.

My impression of Kay, having not seen her for almost a week, was not too bad. The most striking thing is that she is humourless, very grumpy and obstreperous. Her way of fighting back, I guess. She's not had a fever for more than 24 hours and generally seems to be slowly recovering. The concern is that her recovery is rather too slow and that there might be something else in her system apart from a bacterium. So she is now also getting stronger anti-fungal medicine as well. She showed some signs of subcutaneous bleeding today, so was given platelets. Exceptionally she got a mild allergic reaction to the platelets, causing a rise in temperature, blood pressure and heart rate... but hopefully these symptoms were only related to the allergic reaction.

Fortunately there has been no need for her to be moved to the high-dependency unit during the last days, so we have been spared that extra level of worry.

Marion is looking pretty worn out, I have to say. The toll on her during the last days is very visible. I'm looking forward to a time when she can take a good long holiday and recharge her batteries. Hopefully Kay will continue to improve. She has to be fever free for four days before they will consider the episode closed. I expect that she will then slide directly into the next and final chemo of the initial phase of the protocol, so I expect that we will be here for at least another week. I also hope that we'll learn more about the search for a donor during that period.