IL2 - Round 3 - Update 4

I have been receiving a little criticism about my posts, about how they are boring, lacking "explosiveness" etc.  I am going to do my best to remedy that with this post.  Although I am not making any promises about future posts.

Alisa has been sleeping well.  She usually wakes up once (around 4:00 AM) to go to the bathroom.  The first night she couldn't wake me up to help here so she had to ask the nurse, but I have been able to help her the other nights (it does take some yelling and throwing things across the room).

In the morning we get a visit from the nurse practitioner and the doctor.  They give use an update on Alisa's blood work and when they think she will be getting doses.

We try to eat breakfast before the first dose.  We have learned that eggs are off limits.  They might taste good going in, but when they come out later, they look exactly the same and smell horrible.  The last time she had eggs she didn't throw up for almost 4 hours and the eggs still came back up the same, yellow and chunky.  She has been eating fruit for most meals.  The fruit is amazingly good and fresh here, not sure how they do that. 

Alisa has been throwing up regularly this week.  They have given her quite an assortment of drugs, zofran, ativan, morphine :), some mental health drug that is supposed to help with nausea, none of them are helping much.  She feels sick most of the time, and throws up about every time she gets out of bed.

Because of this we have learned that fruit digests quickly and is not so bad coming up, kind of a nice purplish color.  The dietitian recommend she try a milk shake, this comes up exactly the same way it went down.  Peanut M&M's for a late night snack, colorful. 

All of this just today.

We try to get up and go for a walk at least once a day.  Alisa can walk about 100 yards, and then she is ready to sit back down (and throw up).  I have to mention that last time we were here we used a good sized quilt to wrap around her shoulders when she walked.  By the end of the week she mentioned that we needed to get a nice little shawl for the next time around.   When I went back to work the next week, we received a wonderful gift from a co-worker, a prayer shawl that she had been making with her friends.  We have been using it every day.

Alisa has received 8 doses so far and we are hoping to get out of here tomorrow, although I think that is wishful thinking, and probably not reality.  She will very likely get 1 more dose in the morning.

Josh

p.s. Please try to ignore grammatical errors and any punctuation errors, definitely not my strong point.