April 2016: "The Georges in Peru"

The Good News first:

Amy's maintained her weight for about a week now.  

She's been laughing again.  She has rarely laughed and never cried over the last 2 months.  She still will say funny things (I mean on purpose, not the hallucinations, which are funny too).  She's been laughing frequently over the last day or two.  I think it's always nicer to be around people who laugh.

The Bad News:

Last night Amy hallucinated and talked loudly almost the entire night.  She also kicked and pinched and hit me several times.   I only got an hour's sleep.  Several times I pled with her to be quiet, hoping that a rational part of her brain would be able to take over, but that never happened.  The good news is that she didn't seem to be in much pain and seems to not be in much pain today.

The last two times we've weighed Amy she's actually gone up in weight.  I think it is helping that we keep feeding her even after she loses interest.  She's not been vomiting for several days too.  Plus, I've been making lots of icecream and sourdough bread with butter and honey, which she can't resist!

Pretty much anything feasible that Amy requests she gets.  This would be approximately half the requests.  When she requested a haircut yesterday, we thought, "We can do that!"  So Sarah and Mia started their careers as cosmonauts, [ahem] cosmetologists yesterday.

Amy's lost a lot of weight over the last three weeks because she's had no appetite, or worse, nausea and vomiting.  She's been feeling better recently, so we've been trying hard to get her to eat more.  She's really got a sweet tooth and yesterday ate a lot of Swedish Cheesecake (Östkaka.  Doesn't translate well into Spanish) and today for dessert at lunch ate two pieces of apple pie, slathered with whipped cream.  I've learned that if I get a snack in the morning and sit by her to eat it and offer her some, she'll pretty much eat all of it.