I. What Thalidomide Gave Us

As I said, thalidomide gave Richard an almost three year remission. Many of the posts on the MMA mailing list or ACOR mailing list are very critical of thalidomide. Richard has numbness in his fingers and feet that likely will be permanent. He had ongoing problems with constipation and he feels that his thinking was fuzzy while he took thalidomide. But he felt that it was a fair trade for a treatment that was working and didn't require him to be off work for treatment. I think that every patient needs to decide if the treatment is worse than the disease. Sometimes it's a question of quality verses quantity of life.


During this time, I started a job as a family nurse practitioner at a clinic on the Meskwaki Indian Settlement. That's in Tama Iowa which was about a 50 mile drive from our home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It's a great job and I can't wait to get back to it.



Our son and daughter in law gave us our first grandchild, Sarah, on October 13, 2001. They live in Portland, Oregon. In the summer of 2003, we took a three week vacation, driving to Portland and seeing the sights along the way. Some of the places we saw included Devil's Tower, the Little Bighorn Battlefield,the Arizona Meteor Crater, the Grand Canyon, and Hoover Dam. We stayed in Portland for four days. We also stopped in Las Vegas, donated some money to the casinos, ate too much and saw the Cirque de Soleil show.

We had a great time and saw so much of our beautiful country.