Checking In

I think I'm focused enough to post something here.

Fist of all, I want to thank all of you for you so many supportive comments and great advice over the past few weeks as we're passing through this. You can't imagine how much it has meant.

Not that it is likely that they'll ever see it but I can never begin to adequately thank my nurses especially Jodie, Tracy, Robin, Diane, and of course their excellent supervisor Sherry for their professional excellence, caring, and openness to our family.

I'd like too to thank my surgeon. He is excellent. Certainly THIS has not gone well, but overall his postoperative infection/complication rate is about 0.5%, which is excellent. I just got "lucky." He has been excellent in his working to remediate and cure these complications.

BTW, as of my weigh in upon arising with swan this morning, I have now lost 38 pounds in the 4 weeks since beginning the pre-surgical liquid protein diet (301 pounds March 9 down to 263 pounds this morning).

Then there are my two, my loves, who have carried me through this. I am thrilled with how smoothly and predictably t's surgery and recovery have gone. After all the horrific illness we went throuugh with her in 2000, I am genuinely grateful that if this had to happen, it was to me and not her.

swan who spent endless night after night in the hospital sleeping in a terrible recliner chair, to nurse and support me, I can never tell you what all your caring has meant. You supported us both, but most especially me, right to the point of total exhaustion and collapse once you got me home. Thank god you finally got rested again last weekend. I am glad that at least this week when you are off to school you have had a night's sleep at my side, and that at the end of the day you can home to us both here. Thank you for holding my hand while they performed low grade abdominal surgery without anesthesia to open, probe, and express my infection site. It was one of the most gruesome "consensual cutting scenes" I've ever done, and I don't know how I would have passed through the excruciating pain without your gaze and tightly gripped hand.

Thank you to our friends Tangerine and her guy for their visits that lightened my illness when it was in some of its earliest and worst times. They visited us one week day evening and before they left I forgot where I was, and felt like we were at home spending and evening with then sipping Chianti and socializing. It was a fabulous respite.

I have joked that I have improved so wildly that now I am up to feeling just terribly sick. There are the twice daily dressing changes that t and swan share responsibility for. In the last day I have had a low grade temp and feel "infected." I am just sort of generally sick feeling and very tired and weak. I had not had any pain meds for several days, but broke down and took a dose last night. The smaller of my two "holes" started twinging and aching, and I was feeling tired and run down, and just said the hell with it. I am sleeping pretty well, and am managing to go to the bathroom myself. Getting into and out of bed has gotten relatively easy and of course the 38 pounds weight loss help in that regard as well.

Most of my days seem to be spent in pretty continuous eating and drinking from within the boundaries of my limited diet to try to get in as much nutrition and hydration as possible. All signs are that now my new stomach is functioning well.

Thank you again, all of you. There is a way through this, it is just going to take way longer to recover than we ever imagined.

Raheretic

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.