Patient Update

Here's our patient today, still suffering badly from her injuries, still unable to eat solid food. My husband just tried to help her stand up, and the pain was bad. She muttered, "My stupid cytokinins...my bloody interleukins."

"No need to swear," my husband said.

(Katie speaks medicalese all the time as she's been studying so hard for her med school exams which she can't take now).

I had to leave the patient for a few hours to work the Reading School spring fair -- that's my son's school. I couldn't just not show up. While I was there, I ran into Jacqui Gates and her baby daughter. I got the cutest pic of them playing in the sunshine:

Back to my nursing duties now. Am going to move Katie out into the sunshine and open up her bandages so the wounds can have some fresh air and hopefully stop oozing.

Flowers -- full of promise and hope

I was just going to blog about how much I love it when the daffodils bloom in England. It's still cold over here, but when the daffodils come out, it gives you such hope -- they are a harbinger of spring.

So I was putting up a daff pic when Simon Elkins came over with a bag. Inside were tulips from Jacqui Gates to cheer me. She knows I'm suffering from this sort of death watch, waiting for my mother's suffering to end, yet not wanting her to go.

Simon explained that he was far too cool to be seen carrying tulips in a girly vase around the office, so he got Jax to cover them up for the trip to my desk.

These acts of kindness from my friends have bolstered me so much. I spend all day trying to be normal at the office, but my head hurts all the time, and I'm jumpy -- I keep thinking the next phone call or email could contain the news I'm dreading to hear.

What would I do without my friends?

My friends have been tremendous support to me during this hard time in my mother's illness. My friend Jacqui Gates, who has a small baby at home, took the time to bake me one of her famous fruitcakes that people in the office beg her to make. Once you taste this delicacy, you can't stop eating until the whole thing is gone. That's why we all fight over her cakes in the office whenever she makes one. But this one, she said, is all mine! I don't even have to share one slice of it. How thoughtful is that?

Another friend, Elizabeth Applebaum, is making it her job to send me one email a day with something that will cheer me up. This morning I found this stunning piece of writing waiting for me in my Inbox:

"In first grade, Mr. Lohr said my purple tepee wasn't realistic enough, that purple was no color for a tent, that purple was a color for people who died, that my drawing wasn't good enough to hang with the others.

I walked back to my seat counting the swish-swish-swishes of my baggy corduroy trousers. With a black crayon, nightfall came to my purple tent in the middle of an afternoon.

In second grade, Mr. Barta said, 'Draw anything.' He didn't care what. I left my paper blank, and when he came around to my desk, my heart beat like a tom-tom while he touched my head with his big hand and in a soft voice said, 'The snowfall. How clean and white and beautiful.'"