T+131: Tiring Days and the Zombie CEO

I'm so tired, I've really had to drag myself to the computer this evening to update the blog. Things here are medically good, clinically very difficult. Kay's blood counts remain wobbly but generally good. I'll be interested to see what they are tomorrow. If I get the chance (and have the energy) I'll post them here. There's not really much to say about her medical progress, we're just waiting and hoping that her blood counts continue to rise, that T-cells appear soon and that the viral loads start to drop. But it could be weeks before we know any more on this subject.

Otherwise Kay is not doing so well. She has been very sick for the last week. On Saturday I think she was sick nine times in the day. This is a different sort of sickness than she had all those weeks ago. Then the sickness was confined to evenings only and once it was gone it was gone until the next evening. Now Kay is sick any time of the day or night, without warning. The poor thing. She is really run down by the whole experience and begs not to have to throw up again, says that she can't take any more. She looks like a ghost half  the time, pale and worryingly ephemeral. Getting feed and medication into her is a constant challenge.

Marion is completely brilliant with the situation. She starts at 7.30am with medication and more or less struggles with the subject the whole damned day, if she's lucky finishing around 11pm. She's become a dab hand at cleaning up vomit whilst issuing a variety of soothing assurances to Kay. But the problem is that the sickness has no respect for humanitarian hours, it carries on, unpredictably, right through the night. After a string of broken nights, with both Marion & I having progressed to being day-time zombies, we decided to sleep apart. Taking turns, one of us will sleep with Kay in our bed, the other in the guest room, the idea being that one of us will get a good night's sleep. Since I need to be up early tomorrow to take Kay to Nijmegen, I wanted to sleep well tonight, so I volunteered to take the first night (Tuesday). The disadvanatge of this plan was that today was due to be a very busy day in the office, with an important customer seminar scheduled for the afternoon. A bad night would result in a Zombie CEO at the office.

Kay & I settled down around 11pm or so. Trouble started at 12.30am, when Kay was suddenly sick. I was drifting off to sleep when I heard a thump as Kay dived out of bed onto the floor and stuck her head in a bucket, poor poor thing. She's becoming quite skilled and not so much cleaning up was necessary. We settled back down again. At 2am she needed (help) to go to the toilet. At 3.30am she managed the toilet on her own. But at 5am I was yet again woken by the sound of her diving onto the floor and being sick. This time she missed the bucket. Worse yet, the convulsions were so strong that she also had an involuntary attack of diarrhea and end up coated up to the armpits under her pajamas in you-know-what.  

The clean-up operation took rather longer this time and included showering Kay down and warming her up, scrubbing the carpet and loading the various soiled items of clothing into the washing machine, all whilst trying not to wake Marion. Unfortunately, Marion cottoned on to the fact that there was something happening, but by that time I'd sorted everything out. There was not much of the night left, especially as I had to be at the barbers at 8am and the office at 9am. I'm sitting here now feeling like there's 220 volts of tiredness running through my body from head to foot and I shall be off to an early bed shortly.

We have no idea why Kay is being sick. Neither do the medics. A friend gave me the name of a specialist dietician who, out of desperation, I called today. She suggested that Kay's digestive system needs priming with 'good' bacteria, since the radiotherapy will have killed all the naturally occuring bacteria in her system. This sounds like a brilliant idea and I plan to raise it with the specialist tomorrow. But if that's not the solution, I'd like to know what is, this is a very very hard situation for us all.

I'd like to put in a special word for all the guys at Verum, who put in a lot of work to make our seminar the decent event that it turned out to be. I hope that their Zombie CEO didn't let the side down. Thanks guys, you're great!