Loose Strife

I am really really pleased to say that Laura is in excellent shape relative to what we were expecting. Her mobility has continued to improve, which has been a big surprise. Her walking is almost back to normal. She now walks up the stairs normally, alternating each leg, she hops out of chairs, the car, or bed with ease, and she walks around the house and garden without a cane and hardly a worry.
Her back and leg pain are under control with morphine and she has no chronic pain problems. Even her tingling, numb hand is better.
I admit I’m selfishly pleased that she can put the kids to bed on her own or lift Naomi in her arms. She hasn’t done these sorts of things for the better part of a year!
She is tired. Her eating and sleeping are out of whack. And some days she’ll sleep for 18 or more hours. Laura is borderline anemic and the oncologist suspects that the chemotherapy is the cause of the low blood counts and her fatigue. So Laura is on a reduced chemotherapy dosage this week and she also began a new weekly injection called Procrit to stimulate red blood cell production.
I think she is also losing some short term memory. Dates, discussions, plans, and prescriptions are the sorts of things she forgets.
But this is all manageable. And she’s in far better shape than her doctors would have predicted. I often think about why. Could the Xeloda and Avastin be working to not just keep her cancer from spreading in her nervous system, but reducing the cancer load throughout her body? Did the radiation kill the tumor in her spine and her improvement over the last month is just natural healing? Is her particular cancer simply slow? There’s no telling.
Whatever the reason, it’s very hard for me to imagine Laura declining again, which is to say that I’m frightened that it will happen despite this big bounce. I’m thinking of the future now in terms of six or twelve months away, but I know that doing so is naive. Still, had we but world enough and time, what then?