Hi Folks -
Finally getting a chance to write my own post from the hospital. Nope, no wi-fi here to use, but I can at least type it and have one of my lackeys (ow, stop whacking my ear!) enter it in.
We're at day five here, and I'm pretty sure we've got at LEAST another day before they'll consider sending me home. I had a pretty rough day yesterday, but today I've made considerable happy progress. For one thing, they finally stopped waking me up every hour for some medical test of procedure or shot or other indignity. (Speaking of, just as I was typing that, somebody came in to get my vital signs.) That doesn't mean I didn't keep waking up every hour or two, I've been conditioned to expect it now, and there's also constant nighttime entertainment. For one thing, there's the old lady down the wall who's bellowing constantly at all hours, and her voice reminds me of the woman that Ben Stiller works for in the movie "Mystery Men" ("Just junk it!!!"), so now I just think of her as "Sally." (If you didn't get that reference, go find and rent the movie and watch. Now. I'll wait.)
Back now? Wasn't that great?
Anyway, I went for a stroll around the hospital wing today, with my support crew surrounding me like fighter planes to my WWII bomber, with various people holding an elbow for balance, and somebody carrying my "drain box," for want of a better term, where the tubes from my chest end up and everybody gets excited if there are no bubbles and less fluid. Sometimes somebody is even pushing my IV rack, like some weird electronic hat stand, but this afternoon we left it behind. Chelle has been so invaluable as my crew chief. She's even helped load me into the CT scanner yesterday when the folks who are paid to do these things obviously didn't plan ahead enough to realize I'd need a hose wrangler with all these tubes sticking out of me. (OK, stop snickering, you people with dirty minds.)
Oh, speaking of hoses, the longest hour of my life was the time I spent, fully conscious, waiting for them to remove my breathing tube the day after my "procedure" (which is what you call an operation after you're 40, seemingly). Every few minutes they'd tell me it would be "just a few more minutes." At first, they had my hands restrained, but after they realized they could trust me not to just rip the darn thing out of my face, they let me have my hands back, which helped considerably - I was going a little bit crazy and getting claustrophobic. Once my hands were free, I could (very carefully) scratch my nose and ear, and gesticulate wildly trying to communicate with Chelle with some kind of weird medical charades game. They'd say "a few more minutes" and I'd roll my eyes, point to the clock, and stare fixedly at chelle as I showed all five fingers of my right hand - over and over ("five, ten, fifteen, twenty..."). I think we'd reached forty minutes of "just a few more minutes when it looked like some action was about to be taken. Chelle advocated for me fiercely, but she came to see the throat tube as something of an ally - what else could keep me from saying anything at all for over a day? Since then, whenever I've started to get out of line, she's looked at me sternly, and said, "Don't make me get the tube!"
Ok, lunch time is coming up, and I'm getting tired typing (this is hard work), so I'll sign off for now. No idea when I'll be back, but definitely when I get home from my ordeal - I mean, "procedure" in a couple days.