10-17-06 Update

Hello everyone,

Well in the last week Valerie has deteriorated quite a bit. It seems all too real now. Valerie decided she did not want to take her chemo any longer. She assured me that it did not matter to her if it was slowing the growth down. She said it was making her sick and she would rather it grow faster and not be as sick then to be sick all the time and live longer. She stopped taking it on the 11th. She is not getting as sick but I am not sure if that is because she stopped the chemo or if it is the marinol she has been taking. She does not eat very much at all now and has been sleeping most of the day and night. Some days she will sleep the entire day and not eat a thing and then the next day we will be able to get her to eat 2 or 3 times. About half bowl of soup is all she will take in for a meal.

The other changes are with her throat. She takes a while to swallow. It is as if she has to think about it and prepare to swallow. A lot of the time she chokes on drinks. So we have "thick it". This is something you put in liquids to make it thicker. This should help with her swallowing drinks. The swallowing problem does make eating a big issue. She will hold food in her mouth and not chew it. We have to keep reminding her to chew and swallow. We are feeding her now. She spills everything if she holds it. Her speech is slurred now. This is due to the tumor in her brain. She is having problems with her eyes also. She has double vision and she is dizzy most of the time she is awake. It is hard for her to look to the left, to look at whom ever is at her bed side. Sometimes more than others. It seems to be worse the first half hour after waking her up. When she is awake she often has a right sided stare. She will look off at nothing, and if you get her attention she will stop. However she will gaze off again.

We have changed some of her medications today. Trying to lower the pills she has to swallow. Her decadron (steroid) will be a small amount of liquid now. We are stopping her methadone and have replaced it with a fentanyl patch, that we will change every 72 hours. This is for pain. We are slowly taking her off the neurontoin. She has been on this for a long time. It was for pain in her legs before she lost movement in them. We are also taking her off zelnorm. it does not seem to help her bowels anyway. Also stopping the zofran, that was for nausia caused from the chemo. She has other meds for that now and she is not taking the chemo now. So with all those changes we have taken quite a bit of the pills she was taking away. The medication changes started today so I will keep you updated if there is a problem with the changes.

I want to thank everyone for their continued support and prayers. It has been a long year for us and it seems we are coming very close to the end of this hard journey. I am not sure how much more updating I will be doing, but if I can't I will get someone to take over with letting you know what is going on.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for everything!
Bernice