Day 130, Year 11: Holding Pattern
Date: Monday, February 29, 2016
Weather: Mostly Cloudy, Another Relatively Warm Day with Afternoon Rain
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
Happy Leap Day! I’m afraid we didn’t leap very far forward today. But we didn’t go backwards either, so that’s a good thing. We had the appointment with Mark’s oncologist but we didn’t get to sign the papers to apply to be in the drug trial. Instead, we had to sign papers to allow Mass General to send Mark’s tissue samples to Novartis for further testing. Novartis is the pharmaceutical company sponsoring the trial and they need to run one more test on the tissue samples before Mark can be considered as a candidate for this trial. That will take a week or more. If Mark is still found to be a good candidate, we will then go back to Mass General to sign the paperwork. That will be followed by a few more in-hospital tests. Hopefully by the end of March we will know whether or not Mark is in the trial. In the meantime, Dr. Kwak prescribed new medications to help Mark deal with the pain. And now we will sit and wait. Patience has never been a strong suite for either of us, but we are learning.
My niece Lynn, owner of this condo that she has so graciously agreed to let us stay in, became our hero for the second day in a row. Yesterday she was our hero for welcoming us to her condo. And today she was our hero because she accomplished what Mark found to be impossible. She got us hooked up to cable TV and internet. This morning Mark called Comcast, the cable company we have to deal with here, to see if they could use Lynn’s existing equipment to get us hooked up to internet and TV. After waiting for over 30 minutes to talk to someone, the answer was simply no. It all seemed like way too much trouble and money, so he hung up and decided he never wanted to deal with Comcast again. Later in the day we got a call from Lynn. She had called Comcast and was told the same thing, but she persisted, talked to someone higher up, and got that person to agree to let us use her existing equipment. Lynn called and gave us the name of the person and her direct line. We called and almost instantaneously we had both TV and internet. Thank you, Lynn! With the spotty cell service we have here, having internet via cable will make life so much nicer. And since we have weeks of sitting and waiting patiently, we will enjoy watching the political ‘show’ as it continues to evolve. Mark is a political junky, so he is a happy camper. And I can now use Skype to call people on their home phones. If you want to reach me, you can call or text to let me know, and then I can call you back on your cell or home phone via Skype on my computer. Otherwise, I have to stand outside to talk on the phone. On a day like today, that’s not too bad. But we have a few cold days coming up and standing outside on the deck to talk on the phone just doesn’t sound like fun.
The rain this afternoon thwarted our efforts to go into Boston on the train. The train ride would have been fine, but the walk from North Station to the hospital would not have been fun in the rain. So we drove. It took us 45 minutes to get to Mass General. Not bad, but we were sure the ride home in rush hour traffic was going to be horrendous. But we were wrong. It was actually just fine. So at least we now know how long it takes to drive and we know that coming home at rush hour is not all that bad.
