Deb is continuing to progress. Now that the weather is decent we've been
outside walking almost every day. Wednesday we walked two miles to go to
lunch and two miles back, though Deb had to stop a couple times each way.
(Deb's condition is masking my own lack of physical fitness. I can walk the
two miles without stopping, so I think I'm doing great.)

The main problem at the moment is the lining around her left lung, which
swelled up right after surgery and never completely went down. So the left
lung can't inflate all the way, which means Deb gets short of breath when she
does anything strenuous. This effect is magnified by a relatively low red
blood count, which might be a side-effect of Gleevec. (If so, it's the only
one so far.) The doctors are monitoring all this. Eventually it might be
necessary to drain the fluid out of the lung lining or take drugs to increase
the red count, but for now we're waiting to see if the body fixes itself.

Deb is still probably a couple weeks away from returning to work. Her mental
stamina is low, like her physical stamina. I can see little signs of
returning ambition, but she doesn't notice them.

We had a scare in mid-March. Deb got a nasty case of whatever intestinal virus
was going around, but for a while we were worried that it might be something
worse. The first symptoms were bad abdominal cramps, and since I wasn't sick,
it looked like either a surgerical complication or some new blockage. We
ended up going to the emergency room at Beth Israel on Monday night, the
17th, and she was there for a little less than 24 hours while they did x-rays
and CAT-scans and all sorts of other stuff. (I managed to sneak off for four
hours of sleep at a friend's house, though I'm getting better at sleeping in
chairs at the hospital.) Personally, I came to the conclusion Deb was OK when
she managed to keep down the two bottles of garbage you have to drink to do a
CAT scan, but the doctors needed another 16 hours to confirm that.

At 1 a.m. on Tuesday the 18th, Deb looked up from her bed in the ER and said,
"Happy anniversary." She was right: 19 years. That evening after we got home
we had a celebratory dinner of jello chocolate pudding cups.