Alice.

Alice has been in inpatient hospice since last Monday, the 6th. I try and visit most days, she’s on morphine and Ativan, sleeping and getting slower. I thought I had more time with my friend. She decided to stop treatment around Thanksgiving time. I thought she was going to go off the chemo and then feel better for at least a month or two (when the chemo flushed out, but the cancer had not yet had the chance to advance) and we could eat food together that tasted good (she always complained bitterly about how food tasted terrible on chemo – so we never ate together) and go to Roosevelt Island together on a 70 degree day in December (Doris, we can’t go when it’s cold! I’ll be too cold! – I said – I’m sure there will be warm days in December and we’ll go on an adventure) with the dogs. I hadn’t seen Sofi since Monday when her dad and I carried Alice down the stairs into the van to drive her to hospice. But I got to see her outside yesterday and give her two great big bear hugs which made me feel somewhat better – but still terrible. I have been sleeping well generally this past week even with everything going on, but I woke myself (and Jeremy) up last night screaming – Jeremy described it as a scream at the top of my lungs.

Edda was a close contact with someone at school last Wed. How close? Close. hahaha – f*ck me. And she’s been having a runny nose. So we’ve been rapid testing her every morning and then PCR test on Sunday – everything is negative. PCR tests are still f*cking hard to schedule – all full all the time. We are two years into this, I don’t understand so many things like why I can’t get a PCR test 5 minutes from my house every 5 minutes. We wore masks in the house when we were with her. Jeremy complained about the mask wearing – when can we stop? She is testing negative all the time! (He’s the only one not used to wearing a mask for 8 -12 hours at a time.) I was like – can we please just do this to save Christmas? Vince came home from school on Saturday night. He landed in a crazy windstorm that, thankfully, I didn’t think clearly about until after he was on the ground when he texted – I’m on the ground, a scary landing I thought the wing was going to hit the runway, but we made it. I mean, the car was being blown around on the Dulles toll road when we were driving to the airport, why I didn’t freak out about the plane landing is beyond me. It’s nice having him home – though he’s (per usual) asleep all day and awake all night. We are playing Pokemon Go together and I’m at a higher level than him. Hahahaha. I’m going to kick his butt. He gave me his childhood paper book Pokedex. Yesterday, he came downstairs feeling a bit under the weather – which, of course, always happens the week after finals – all that pent up stress relaxes and then you get sick. He protested a bit – I don’t have covid, I was tested just a few days ago at school! I looked at him. He looked at me. We looked at Jeremy. So we rapid tested him (he looked at the nose swab and was like – this is a nose thing? I’ve only had to do the spit thing. (UCDavis invented their own in-house spit thing – less than $6 a test.) Why that isn’t available every 5 minutes 5 minutes from my house is also mysterious and incredibly frustrating) – negative. I’m trying to be sure we save all the Christmas plans – including an incredibly fancy dinner party tomorrow night (4 wines. omg. who are we?) for my mom’s 80th and the holiday trip that starts with air travel and ends with a U-Haul truck rental next week. I want to wear a mask all the time until the end of the season honestly, though the fact that everyone is still getting runny noses despite mask wearing doesn’t give me super confidence in mask efficacy.

I’m behind at work (obviously).