Darcy

I love this picture, me and Darcy sitting out by our pool having a barbecue. Looks like the perfect Southern California day, doesn't it? Darcy is frowning at Bennet for taking the picture, she thinks she looks so bad she doesn't want any pictures taken of her. I just want food. Even here the fact she is now skin and bones is obvious, the drugs have been hard on her.

She just spent 3 days in the hospital for testing of all kinds, her doctor wanted to get to the bottom of what was wrong. She was miserable, couldn't sleep and was so weak at one point she fell and hurt her thigh and is using a walker now to get around, but that should be only temporary. They found out two new things, she has cirrhosis and thrombocytopenia, that second one is a low platelet count which causes easy bruising and at it's worst can be quite dangerous, causing internal bleeding. She is bruised all over, especially on her arms, she has one bruise on her chin just from leaning on her hand while reading.

We don't really know how bad each disease is, just found out about them as she was leaving the hospital at 7 PM last night, we'll find out about treatment next week. But that gives me some hope, I thought she was just breaking down and they wouldn't be able to find anything specific but this gives us something we can deal with. I've been reading up on Milk Thistle, which is the long time herbal standard for liver problems but the web, as usual, has conflicting reports. There have been several studies showing it's benefits but I found one recent article that showed it did nothing, I don't have a lot of confidence in that one though.

For 14 years we've just been buying time, we knew it was a battle we would lose eventually, but hopefully we can buy some more time still. We haven't done badly so far.