Sybil almost immediately went back on the Celebrex, not wanting to deviate from her previous therapy. She's also taking a diuretic medicine to combat some bloating. The other main addition is that she now takes a huge dose of EPA/DHA (6000+ mg of each per day, derived from fish oil) to prevent cachexia. She seems to tolerate this quite well.

I wish I could say the same about the Dexamethasone. She's stepped back a tad from her usual massive 24mg a day dose, but she's still going nuts from it. Unfortunately, I mean this literally. Yesterday she launched a wild, screaming tirade at my direction because I'd made the mistake of purchasing some cheese. She went on raging uncontrollably for many minutes. I knew she was out of control, far beyond rational conversation, and started hugging her in an attempt to calm her down. She went on yelling at me -- while she was hugging me back! Quite a bizarre experience but it proved to me beyond a doubt that she couldn't control what she was doing. Later, she was able to confirm this.

My guess is that prolonged lack of proper sleep due to the Dexamethasone is the main culprit. Sybil has stopped taking the Melatonin; again because she is afraid it will interfere with her plan to most closely reproduce the therapy that seemed to give us best results. Her last two scans were not very encouraging.

Sybil's nocturnal thrashings and extreme hypersensitivity (she woke me up once to ask that I breathe in another direction) have pushed me out to the living room couch. I seem to do more soul searching than sleeping there.

A few times in my life I've had near-death experiences, such as breaking through the ice over a river and falling to the bottom, or a near head-on collision on a slippery highway. On these occasions it seemed to me as if time had slowed to a crawl. I felt encapsulated by a universe where microseconds stretched into minutes as I observed my impending doom with unhurried detachment.

The past two years have been a little bit like that for me. I seem to be stuck in an agonizingly torpid panic, calmly terrified of what may lie ahead. I'm in a slow-motion free fall, waiting for the parachute to open.

Matt Donath

Mdonath@yahoo.com