We spent our Sunday afternoon with Nadine’s sister Annika in the park area of the university which is right across the street from the Katharinenhospital. While the two sisters were talking, I was busy collecting chestnuts. Annika took quite a mass of them home to Tübingen so that little Nick is on duty for handicraft now – or maybe about to become King Chestnut in his kindergarden…

As far as Nadines’s breakdown is concerned, we don’t have any proper results yet. The crucial examinations are going to take place tomorrow, so we still have to wait for explanations. She is feeling way better again and we hope for a release on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning.

On Thursday, we got the results of Nadines’s quaterly brain scan. Unfortunately, they weren’t like we were hoping for: while the nine old metastases remained unchanged, it looks like new ones are forming. They found new irregularities which are to small by now to cause any effects, but they can be seen. Her doctor’s plan was to do some further examinations of other body parts in order to get a complete picture and to develop a new plan for treatment in a tumor conference. It seems like Eribulin isn’t the appropriate approach.

One of these further examinations was scheduled for Friday morning when I had to go to work. We therefore asked Nadine’s father to come around and accompany her. When I left the house around 8 a.m. Nadine was fine and I didn’t have any suspicions. In the picture above you can see her in good shape on our terrace on Thursday afternoon.

But things can go south very quickly. When her father arrived at 10 a.m. she was asleep and he had difficulties to wake her up. Being awake, she was absent, disoriented, unresponsive and weird. He ended up calling an ambulance that took Nadine to the Katharinenhospital.

I went there immideately and spent about seven hours at the side of a hospital bed with her being mostly sedated or sleeping. They checked her head again but nothing had changed compared to her last magnetic resonance theraphy – this was the one taken on Monday and presented by her doctor on Thursday.

The neurologists in the Katharinenhospital are confident that her current state is not caused by her metastases or by the atarictics which were tapered out until one month ago. Due to her weird behaviour I was first assuming that her steroid psychosis had returned. The doctors were also supposing a meningitis but that doessn’t seem to be the case either.

In the moment she is supervised and treated with antibiotics in a broad kind of approach. Their hypothesis now is that the new trouble was caused by a bacterium or a virus. In order to become sure they need to extract some liquor  from her spine first. This couldn’t be done yesterday because Nadine is currently taking anticoagulants.

About two hours ago she called me, an action which was completely out of scope yesterday. She doesn’t know what has happened but is speaking clearly. You keep your fingers crossed and I will soon be on my way to hospital again.

Art therapy is a weekly session Nadine really enjoys. As her therapist needs surgery right now, it got cancelled until beginning of November. Starting in February, Nadine has produced 16 works until now. You can watch all of them in a gallery:

Art Therapy Works