Been praying for Lil and Sonia this week. Would love an update...

Sorry, Grrrls! Thank you SOOOOO much for your prayers!

Sonia is doing OK... getting her affairs in order, so to speak... going through her enormous suitcase of old papers... she wanted my help, but the day she started doing it, I was feeling poorly and had to bow out. Now she has decided she doesn't really need any help sorting them out (half of it is in Spanish, so I would not be any particular help!). I think she might call upon me to help her organize stuff once she has decided what to keep and what to throw away.

She's concentrating on that, I think, to keep her mind busy. I'm focussing on hurricane preparedness to keep my mind off the possibility that she's got cancer in a really, really bad place (Is there any *good* place for it?).

Sonia has also said that this particular doctor has made mistakes before... he thought she had psoriasis on her right arm once... it was just age spots and nervous itching, it turns out, but he referred her to a dermatologist anyway.

Strange thing is... I got a chance to speak to the doctor's nurse... and she made it sound like Sonia is a new referral for their office.... I think Sonia really meant that doctors in general have made mistakes that had to be ruled out. So she's not going to let herself worry about it.

However, I can see some signs of strain in her. She's got manageable schizophrenia with depression... She takes medication for both... but she still hears voices and often misinterprets stuff... like, if she dreams something, she doesn't distinguish that from waking reality. Also, if she *suspects* or imagines something happenned, it is just as real to her as though it were actually happenning.

She's worried about break-ins all the time, because we live in a crappy neighborhood... so she worries about every sound, and even wanted to sleep on the couch in the living room because she was afraid someone would break in (wanted to be our security guard). I told her not to worry about it, that no one was going to get in here. She obsesses about her sons, even my husband Raul ... she imagines she's hearing one or both of them talking, calling out to her, needing help, getting into trouble around the neighborhood, etc. She does thing a lot more lately, so I'm sure she's under stress. Also, she has taken a dislike to a little girl in the building who's a good friend of mine, but she tends to be really saucy and bossy... the kid is 6 years old, but Sonia imagines she's up to all kinds of evil! Yesterday, Sonia told me she saw this poor child acting as though she were high on drugs... as though she'd found something on the sidewalk and taken it... lol, the poor kid had been crying hysterically all night and all day over an inner ear infection, and had not been outside for the entire time.

When I told Sonia that the child had been stuck inside her apartment for almost 2 days, she insisted she'd seen her. I gently insisted that whoever she'd seen, it couldn't have been my little friend, because my little friend was very sick. Sonia didn't bring it up again.

So part of my worries about Sonia are tempered with the knowledge that "It ain't necessarily so!" And also knowing that she's bored, and a little lonely, and does stuff for attention sometimes.... but the lip problem is very real, except that it's more a matter of her lip being scorched by hot tobacco smoke... the cancer, if it's there, is in the very beginning stages, and apparently treatable once she gets to the right ENT doctor... we're still waiting on a referral.

Thanks for all your prayers... please don't stop! I'm trying to cope with hurricane preparedness, when I don't have money to do even half of what I think I should do. Raul went out and got a bunch of batteries, but not the ones we need for the big flashlights! <sigh> Oh, well, he tries. Pork and beans are cheap, so I'm going to stock up Coleman stove, just in case we lose the electricity. Now if I can just get these two stubborn folks to agree to evacuate if the storm gets too close.... they don't want to budge.

Love,
Lil