Here’s a view on the D-building of the Katharinenhospital at night. Station D6 is on the top floor, Nadine’s room number 20 is the one with the shutters down highlighted by the red arrow. You can stop by whenever you like as long as you don’t exhaust her. It might also happen that she’s asleep and doesn’t realise there are visitors.

The picture was taken from the station of bus number 42, which is the one connecting the hospital with our home in a drive of about ten minutes. It’s a drive I hade to make on Saturday at 4:30 a.m. I tried to stay with Nadine for the night but she couldn’t find any sleep at all. In a state I would describe as semi-conscient she was talking to people who weren’t around for hours. The way these ghost-talks went suggested that she even received answers.

She gets medication against hallucinations now but still has problems with regular sleep and meals. Soups seem to work best. Today, she will reveive her third dose of MTX.

After a busy day – there were many visitors and I also talked to the psycho-oncologist and the social worker yesterday – I spent a second successive night in Nadine’s hospital room. A night that went way better than the last one: her breathing was almost back to normal and she slept through without moaning.

She is still slow, weak, uncoordinated and unable to stand, but she is eating tiny portions of food again. This morning, I managed to feed her half of the yoghurt which was on her menue for breakfast. Around noon she will receive her second dose of MTX. I guess all of this together can be interpreted as a small step away from imminent disaster.

When I returned to hospital yesterday, maybe around 7 pm, Nadine was asleep again. The hospital staff brought me a bed of my own which was put aside of hers. I sat there for hours, holding her hand for the rest of the evening and into the night. I switched the lights off about 10 pm but couldn’t find any sleep myself. Instead, I monitored her breathing which was heavy and turned into snoring sometimes.

When I finally manged to doze away, Nadine suddenly adressed me by name – obviously she was well aware that I was around the whole time. From 2 am on we were talking to each other for about an hour. Her talking was very slow and her tongue seemed to be a bit lame, but the things she said were mostly coherent. She was able to answer simple questions and stayed awake.

At some point, she mentioned to have a headache. The night nurse gave her a pain-relieving shot, but she continued to complain. Not about her headache anymore but about some obscure pain in general. She could never get clear which part of her body hurts, it was changing with the minute or couldn’t be spoken out at all. The night nurse and I suspect that she is so confued that she doesn’t feel these things correctly. The nurse, who has got experience with such kind of patients, said that her facial features didn’t suggest any pain. And I know that she has a tendency to react with moaning ‘Auaauaaua’ even to things which aren’t much physical at all. Being asked how she felt just a minute later, she often answered that she’s good…

At 6 am, when the morning shift took over, I was so tired that I had to leave and catch some sleep at home. I left with the confidence that she is arousable again and with the hope, that her MTX-therapy might be continued soon. By the way: her vital functions were never a problem throughout the whole treatment and they are still okay now.