Wardrobe

Monday 7 May

Any level of normalcy may best be measured in small increments over short time spans until, finally, they measure up to a trend, and then, over the long haul, to a future.

This morning Lara and I had our breakfast at the table where I dished out the headlines from the Herald Tribune (she can not handle a newspaper this size very well). It was all about Hollande and Sarkozy, and about the impossible election results in Greece. Lara lamented the fact she hadn't seen any TV news in weeks, and we plan to get her hooked up to the other oxygen machine, the one in our den which we have had since she first came home from the hospital, in July of last year.

By then the nurse had come around to do her toilettage and Saoud, our hospice for today, was going about her business. Lara decided she wanted a particular kind of cotton vest to keep her arms warm and sent me off on a mission impossible to go through her closets. Predictably, I failed miserably, so she decided to go on a foray and do her own thing. With Saoud and her Baxter in tow, she shuffled through the apartment all the way over to the other side, where her sweaters are located. She found what she wanted and brought some order in the various stacks, which had gotten a bit unwieldy under the hands of passing members of the household (which would include me).

Doctor Willemot came by, back from a monastery in the Morvan and a weekend in Orval (which is my favorite monastic retreat, too). She was astounded to see how well Lara was doing, even after having spoken to her substitute over last week, Doctor Frings. At her instruction the coordinator for home care lowered the dosage for Tranxen and morphine from 20 to 15 mg per day. We will see how that works out. Her saturation stands at 99 with 6-7 liters per minute. Her pulse is a bit high by her own standard, at 98/minute, and her tension is about her own average: 9 over 5.

Her mask doesn't fit very well and I promised to go all the way to Saint Luc and pick up a new one. I hate the ride, which will take me easily an hour and half, but it is for the poor kiddo's comfort, shall we say. We broke in the afternoon with carrot soup, sitting at the table. Before she sat down, she put on her pink turban (which we found again) and clipped on a pair of pearl earrings. Girl's gotta do whatta girl's gotta do.

This may not seem much of a morning to healthy people caught up in a hectic schedule, but really, this is progress. The only question is progress to what? Where will this all lead to? Is she going to keep on vegetating this way for many more months? Will she catch something? Is she going to wilfully force a crisis by resisting parts of her treatment? Visitors are confused. They see a person who is skin over bone, yet challenges in conversation at every turn. Doctors call her sub-terminal, but somehow she clings to life. As a result, people who had come to say their final goodbyes (like my family yesterday), don't know, at the end of the visit, whether to say "adieu" or "au revoir".

Let us see how Wednesday's blood sample comes out, when she goes in for another transfusion. That should tell us something about which way we are headed. What levels will be in evidence for white and red blood cells, and platelets. How many neutrophils will she carry? Will they do a microscopy and look for bad cells? Those are hard indicators.

We will take it one step at the time.

Until we see a trend.

And perhaps a future.