Not Palliative Care Yet

There's news. I'm choosing to interpret it as good, though I suppose it's more of a holding pattern right now.

I'll spend more time filling out the details later, but the short version is that when I called Mom today she sounded a lot better than yesterday. Probably that had something to do with the fact that this time I didn't wake her up when I called. I knew I needed to temper my reaction last night, which is why I tried (and probably failed, but that's me) to stick to the facts without interjecting too much of my own views.

It turns out she's not being put in palliative care yet. She's getting her name on a list that's apparently the one used for getting into palliative care but, as I kind of mentioned last night, she's not going to be going anywhere. She'll be staying with her friend Janet, but once a week they'll have a nurse in to see her and check on her status. That's good. That's probably really good, actually.

The other good news is the drugs she got from Dr. Kahn. It's actually two prescriptions, not one, but one seems to be purely an anti-nausea thing while the other has a desirable side-effect: increased appetite. The first is something called apo-metoclop (which Christine found in one of her magical chemical databases as metoclopramide. She tells me this is a synonym in the same way 'process', 'program' and 'application' are synonyms, there's differences between them but at the level we care about, they're equivalent). The second is dexamethasone which is a steroid as well but has different characteristics than prednisone, which I already thought was doing some (minimal, admittedly, but I'll take what I can get) good.

The important thing, though, is she was in good spirits tonight. She ate a bit of casserole at dinner and she was generally pretty positive. We talked for almost an hour, the longest she's seemed to want to talk in quite a while, and she seemed mostly decided that she was going to go ahead with chemo at this point. She'd already come to the conclusion that she could reasonably easily just stop it at any time if she wants (obviously we don't want that, but the fact remains that she can make her own decisions and she has the right to say "that's enough") so it seems low-risk to her to try it. One less thing for me to worry about, I guess. I really, really want her to at least try it and then see and if she's already decided that on her own, awesome.

Actually, in that same vein (no ... well, if I didn't want to be a bit punny, could just take that out, so I guess I intended a bit of gallows-humour there) I really owe Christine for jumping in with the necessary dose of reality. Mom had been talking about trying chemo "for a couple of weeks" but Christine pointed out that the first few sessions are always worse than the later ones while they try to strike at the cancer first and while the sort out the necessary dosages. So hopefully Mom'll remember that when she starts it, that it's going to get better after the first few sessions. The good chemo news is that, as we'd already mentioned in a couple of discussions, it's not delivered via IV, it's a pill form. Hopefully that'll be less hard on her.

Okay, more detail later, I'll probably just update this post (or maybe follow up with a pt.2) but I'm going to sneak off and do a bit of work-work for now. There's kind of an interesting problem that I think I can fix in a short time that will end up benefiting a few groups if I can get it wrapped up tonight.