Day 177

Good Evening,

OK - sorry for the lack of information this week. Actually, I didn't really know what to say. Its been a tough week. Rita had a complication with her lumbar puncture on Monday and things kind of went downhill from there. The complication from the lumbar puncture caused a leak in her spinal fluid which resulted in severe headaches everytime she sat up or stood up. As a result, she has been pretty much flat on her back all week. Then, she started retaining fluid and some of that went into her lungs. Her weight on Tuiesday morning was 127 lbs. and by Wednesday morning, she weighed 140 lbs. They need to keep the fluids up for her spinal leakage and to keep her blood pressure up but, they don't want her to retain too much as it could cause a pneumonia or other complications. The fluid in her lung has caused significant pain in her side when she takes a breath. So basically, she can't sit up or stand up or breath without experience significant pain. Other than that, she feels pretty good!! Also, she has had some fever and so, they are treating the fluid in her lung aggressively as though it is a pneumonia but, they don't know for sure. Now, just because we need one more thing, one of her lines have cultured positive for infection so they may have to replace her PICC line. We will know more about that tomorrow.

All of this is considered to be known complications from this chemo treatment so it is not anything that the doctors haven't seen before. Naturally, its all stuff that we haven't seen before so it is pretty disturbing from our point of view. Rita is really concerned that this will once more delay her transplant and thereby extend her time out here. As of right now, we are still in the window for a 2/23/11 transplant and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it goes accordingly.

On the brightger side, Rita's headaches seem to be reducing in intensity and we even walked two laps around the nursing station a little while ago. It was really hard for Rita to do this but, she did it and I take it as another important step forward. We will try again tomorrow but for tonight, we will just try to get as much sleep as possible. As you have all heard before, sleep does not come easy around here as someone is barging into the room on almost an hourly basis around the clock. Rita's normally cheerful greetings to the staff are starting to diminish!! Now its more like "What can you possibly want now???". I know that they are doing their job and I appreciate that they are keeping such a close watch over Rita. She will also realize this when she is feeling better.

So, goodnight for now. Love, Dave & Rita.