Deeply not knowing....

Hi everyone: We are in Room 429 at Rotary House. We came to M.D. Anderson yesterday after John's dizziness seemed to be getting a bit worse and his speech was intermittently reverting to its previous slurredness. He had taken 10 days of ambisome infusions and 5 oral drugs (for infections they are hypothesizing as the likely cause of problems). Although we had seen quick improvement in speech and he had reported feeling a bit better, we began seeing some setbacks in certatin symptoms. To complicate it all, John was coughing, snotty, and feeling chilled from some new bug that seems to be going around in Austin.

On Sunday at 5pm, while coming into house from his infusion at Seton, he had slipped down the steps and bruised his head (no serious damage, based on CT scan, etc.) Also, morning nausea (no, he's not pregnant:), and hearing voices intermittently (So far when asked, these were about accessibility, people handing him English Department-related papers, and--I love this--washing dishes! We had contacted neurologist Dr. Art Forman in Houston, asked Dr. Tucker, and all 4 of us agreed that it was a good idea to come back to Houston and check progress at this point.

When we arrived last night, we went straight for an MRI that was set up by Dr. Forman. We were back to the room around 9:45 and at 10:30 Dr. Forman called to say that he had viewed the scan and thought it looked a bit better than one done 10 days ago, but it was inconclusive at this point. Today, he showed me the scan, and I can see some of the white shadowy looking areas getting smaller. Yippee--if this becomes the trend.

Tomorrow John has some special blood tests to investigate low platelets this a.m. and we visit Dr. Andersson at noon. The presumption is that we will go home tomorrow afternoon and resume the ambisome on Thurs. in Austin.

But we don't know. More later......
Thanks to all of you for following our adventures and sending your love,
Anna and John