Sunday evening

Dear Friends and Family,

Its sunday evening and this has been a calm day. Nan has been able to rest a lot today. I have concentrated on getting work out. She got up about 10 or so and then headed back to rest at 2:30 or so this afternoon. She told me not to let her sleep too long. At 7 pm I went up and had a hard time waking her, at 8 I went back up and stayed with her until we came down stairs. She is very sleepy, we went up to 100 on her pain patch today and perhaps she is adjusting to the change. Right now she is in her recliner, has the TPN going and is trying to stay awake for a bit, I keep asking her if she is awake. We have the room warm and the new wood really heats great once you can get it started burning. I even bought kindling at Safeway this evening. And soup Nan likes and more mandarin oranges that Nan likes.

Tomorrow I'm going to go to Redding. Nan has a nurse coming in the morning and Pam has called and is coming in the afternoon so I think she is covered. Tomorrow Nan gets her first Eranas shot, someone said it is $4,800 per shot. We hope and pray that it will help her body make red cells and lift the hemoglobin. We have tried for several months to get it and finally we have it. Just hope it does not cause too much pain during the shot like Procrit did in the past years.

It is sort of difficult to get back into a normal work schedule after the holidays but there were so many good times connected. Great memories made. Our front room fake tree is still standing waiting for Keanna to come take down the decorations. Frosty still guards the front yard for a few hours each evening. And most of the Christmas food has been eated with some sweets still around and a big plate of dried fruit remains too.

Its fun to enter the garage as the wood smell is still here from the new shelves. And no more salt water leaking and leaching the concrete floor, Tom and John put a drain down the edge and so it drains outside now. Thanks for everything guys.

We enter the new week with hearts begging for relief from the nausea. We are considering the possibility that the pretisone in tiny doses once in awhile might give Nan some relief but we need to make sure that it does not get in the way of the Gleevec and Rapamune. For some reason Nan had no nausea in the hospital and that is the only thing we can think of that was different. The nausea is worse all the time and Nan has not been able to eat anything today to speak of. Her life needs some joy in it and some relief.

I'm going to be gone for hours tomorrow so it would be nice if you could call at some point. If Nan is sleepy go ahead and talk anyway, she can always go back to sleep again. I plan to call her often while I am driving. Tomorrow we hope to hear from the oncology office at UCSF too for an appointment.

So our life goes on, challenges, little victories, setbacks and opportunities to laugh, to cry, to hope and to face a new day. Over the past 24 hours there has been very little drainage of the black fluid in Nan's illistomy but some has found its way into the incision wound. We keep hoping that it will quit. We keep hoping.

So once again we ask, please pray that God will come close and help Nan again like He has so many times before.

Its not easy to keep up the courage when day after day Nan suffers so much. Thank you for your input and help.

love

tim and nan