unfortunately it feels like henry is hysterical most of the time he is awake. i just gave them the okay to give henry 25 mg of benadryl to put him to sleep. that isn't working. i just asked for morphine. so now he has morphine, codeine, benadryl and a bunch of other stuff coursing through his veins and he is still thrashing about complaining of pain and the inability to sleep. incredible. he is shaking and can only get words out staccato. i think we are close to getting him on selexa or lexapro or something to take the edge off. dr. cheng of child psych is handling that, but hem/onc hasn't really been consulted yet. i worry about drugs on the growing brain thing (watching too many ADHD and Ritalin stories on TV), but it isn't fair for him to suffer so much and be so sad all the time.
tomorrow marks a month that we've been here in Minnesota and safe to say we're all pretty burned out. the rest of us are paying a physical toll. i finally kicked my stomach bug last night, my knee is screwed up from wearing too big shoes (idiot) and it eerily creaks when i walk, laurie lost a crown which she is getting replaced this morning and jack isn't eating or sleeping well. the cool thing is that jack is going to the Minneapolis Jewish Day School. judaism is like a private club with reciprocity at clubs throughout the world.
though everyone in the family is itching to go home, i am worried about leaving too soon and having important issues unresolved. i really want those few good weeks of nutrition, no pain, stable counts, but laurie, understandably, doesn't believe that is going to happen any time soon and thinks henry will be better off at home. sometimes i think she is the champion of "quality" of life, while i stick crazily to this notion of "quantity" of life. but it really isn't that simple. i think that we often get to the point where we've had just too much of the hospital and all of the associated dehumanizing nonsense and get greedy for home. and we think that the more we're away the harder it is for henry to get better because his emotional well-being has such a strong connection to his physical recovery. but often we rush home only to turn back around a day or a week or a month later for the hospital. in this case, laurie may be right that Minnesota has done all of the critical diagnostic and clinical work to get his GI system running again and to treat his GVH, and now we can care for him at home and Georgetown. i really don't know what is the right course of action, but i normally defer to laurie because she is so damn wise.
