Day 57

Vlad is fighting a minor infection. If it's not from his line I would be very surprised. It bleeds more than any line he's ever had. You can't completely clean it because you have to limit your cleaning window to keep things as sterile as possible. I suppose infusion nurses could do a thorough cleaning, but no one at the hospital seems bothered by all the dried blood in there.

He is pretty tired and kind of weak. His eyebrow hair is finally falling out, four months after his last chemo.

He was at the hospital all day yesterday. His sugar is doing weird things. He remains on the antibiotic infusions. I think just dealing with the 3 infusions a day tires him out. Last month I wistfully thought about a weekend in Galveston this month, and going to Fort Worth to see the family. And we were invited to Beaumont this weekend. But it's just not possible. It's tricky staying on top of all the meds and infusions. Adding travel to the mix would be asking for trouble.

As it turns out, I'm working the homepage on Sunday. We've lost two homepage people in the past month. I saw this coming a week ago when my coworker Will said he had taken a job with Memorial Hermann's web site. He's a great guy and will be a huge loss. But I hope they get the news side sorted out soon. I don't need this.

Anyway, there's a lot going on with the siding job that's turning into a roof job. This crew has been so wonderful. Ricky and his guys are from Honduras. My front patio was a shambles after the siding install, but they power-washed everything and it almost looks better than when they started. I mean, the freeze killed the plants or it might have been much worse. But all in all, great.

When Ricky got the sagging roof off he garage he found a huge problem: a bad frame job. It had been repaired long before we moved in. Another few hundred dollars to rebuild the frame. We're also getting a horizontal vent on the roof, replacing the rotating turbans (my term) we replaced after Ike. The turbans blew off during Ike and water gushed in. And they had been installed incorrectly before we moved in, we found out. The folks who lived here before us were not very careful with their repairs.

Anyway, just saw this morning that Capt. Phil Harris of the crab boat Cornelia Marie on the show "Deadliest Catch" died. That's one of Vlad's favorite shows. We watched a lot of it in the hospital. We used to shake our heads at Capt. Phil, chain-smoking and drinking coffee and not eating anything and working 20 hours straight. Sorry to see he died; he was a really cool guy.