Tuesday April 17, 2007 9:53 PM

Jim's therapy must be working because suddenly you can hear his swallow. No one probably pays attention to that when you're eating, but listen next time and you'll notice that your swallow makes a noise. Jim's was only making this noise when he had the electrodes strapped to his neck during his therapy sessions. Today you could hear it a large portion of the time. He was all excited. "Listen, listen," he says to me as he takes a sip of his chocolate drink...all happy about it. Even though he's really not supposed to yet, he started using the Ensure drinks in small sips instead of the stuff through his feeding tube. He's not going for an official swallow study for a couple more weeks so the official ban on liquids other than water won't be lifted until then, but he's been sipping stuff for about a week so I guess if it was going down the wrong pipe he would have gotten sick by now. I still get nervous every time I see him with a cup, though. "You be careful with that! I don't want to have to take you back to the hospital!" I'm not going to argue with him about the Ensure. If it were me with the problem I would have done the same thing.

The poor guy's got to go back to the dentist. The spot where they pulled three of his teeth in the hospital is still bothering him, so I've got to call Dr. Drain. Yes, Dr. Drain. What a name for a dentist, right?

If you sent Jim a work-related e-mail in the past couple of months he's ploughing through them now...all 638 of them. So please be patient.

Monday April 16, 2007 9:14 PM

I haven't posted every day because there's not much new. I've noticed that Jim's Lexapro has sort of kicked in. His old personality is back for the most part...he's not as irritable...but he was still sleeping too much and watching too much t.v. and not doing enough work. I had to have it out with him AGAIN over the weekend, and then I took drastic action. I hate to do this to a grown man but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I put parental controls on every channel on every cable box in the house so he can't watch t.v. I was thinking about just disconnecting the cable, but then Jimmy and I would have to suffer. We don't deserve that. Jim got slightly bent out of shape for about 5 minutes...he mumbled something about how he can just unplug the cable boxes to clear the parental controls, but he didn't do that. Besides, I'd just put them back on anyway. I can play this game forever. But tonight he finished the machines he was working on so I suspended the parental controls. I made a joke out of it and said, "You got all happy faces today so you get to watch t.v. tonight." Sad, but something had to be done. I told one of my friends the other day that this being a single Mom with two kids really sucks. And what I really don't understand is the man is in the family room right now watching the Food Channel. That's like an alcoholic watching the Beer Channel.

I've also run into about half a dozen people that are on Lexapro in the last week. However, of the ones I've asked about their dosage, they were at 20 mg/day. Jim was only given 10 mg/day. He's been on that now for close to a week so I told him to try taking the 10mg tablets twice a day instead of once. Can't hurt. 20mg seems to be the dosage everyone ELSE is on. He actually can't swallow the pills...he crushes them, mixes them with warm water, then uses a syringe to put the solution into the PEG tube.

As for his "food" that he can't seem to get up to 6 cans a day on because it gives him a horrible stomach ache, since he can have little sips of stuff if he's careful, I got him chocolate flavored Ensure. He was able to get two of those down today to supplement the other stuff.

I'm also getting the impression that his therapist feels like it might be two months or so before he can eat again. Well, time will tell.