Only 7 More Radiation Treatments

December 1 should be the last one. No unmanageable side effects yet.

That will put my final reconstructive surgery in mid to late January. My brother David who lives in the DC area said he would come up and help me with getting to and from the hospital and take care of Jim and me for about 4 days. That should be all we need.

Wait till I tell him he has to give the cat an insulin shot.

We expect Jim to be released Tuesday or Wednesday. He stumbled while climbing stairs this morning with the PT guy, so the PT guy is behind a Wednesday release so Jim can have another full stair training session tomorrow. However, the DR and the OT are ready to let him go. He will get a blood draw tomorrow morning for a final lab check.

Jim now says he is willing to talk to hospice. He was talking with the OT about it when I got there this morning, and he was getting teary eyed. He thinks of hospice as a death sentence. But many people (except the DR) said it wasn't a choice to die. The DR wasn't as positive, saying that if Jim took another turn for the worse, the hospice medical director would choose (given their mission) not to send Jim to the hospital for treatment. We also expressed concern that hospice would not give him PT. The Select staff said that wasn't true, but when I told Jim's case manager that is what DE Hospice told me, she said she would call around to the hospices about that.

Regardless, we likely aren't going to get any help into here until Monday at the earliest. I did not schedule Friday PT for myself because I want to stay with Jim as much as possible once he's here.

Sure, there's that food shopping thing to do. Sigh!