Janet Wendy's status and what's being done about it

Last week we had two sessions at the ALS Clinic, where we saw the neurologist, the respiratory team, the speech language pathologist and the nutritionist. Wendy and I are well aware that she is weaker now than she was last month; she is more breathless and her speech is sometimes hard to understand, and she is having more difficulty swallowing. The challenge of swallowing worries her most and has led her to reconsider her earlier decision not to have a peg tube (stoma or stomach tube) to bypass her throat, so the main agenda item last week was to assess her fitness for the relatively minor surgical procedure involved in providing an artificial opening into her stomach. The consensus of the experts about her fitness is that she qualifies for the surgical procedure -- just. As our palliative care specialist said, they don't like it when patients die on the operating table, or when they have to go to the intensive care unit instead of home after the minor operation to bypass her throat. The gastro-enterologist who does this procedure has just returned from holiday and Wendy will see her tomorrow. Meantime, a community based specialist in ways to deal with difficulty swallowing came to see her today, reiterating the advice and suggestions we've already had from the staff at the ALS Clinic. At the drug store I picked up a whole case of high-protein, high-energy drink that she can swallow very easily. She has lost a lot of weight, is beginning to look quite frail, but she remains in good spirits, and we can still find things to laugh about. So stay tuned for another bulletin after she sees the G-E surgeon.