Recovery Day 5

Hello all...

First, thanks a ton for all your comments on the blog. I´ve never put a ¨counter¨ out here to log the number of visitors, but it´s really nice to know that people are seeing it. (We assume it´s well read by the lack of emails and phonecalls from the many, many interested folks who are praying and wondering about Mom.)

David stayed with Mom in her new room last night. She rested well with many fewer interruptions than in the ICU. She had a good day today as well. In fact, she´s trying to kick us all out of her room and back to our regular lives. It´s a good sign! Details below.

I worked from the hotel (mostly deleted email) for a couple hours this morning and when I arrived at her room around 11:30am today, she was finishing lunch and sitting in her chair. She´d taken a shower and had on her own PJ´s instead of the hospital gear. She looks great.

Earlier today, she went for a walk around her hospital floor. While her strength is likely only about 50% of her norm, she felt good and had enough strength to manage it. While she was out, she ran into her neurosurgeon who was coming to pay her a visit. I think he was impressed (and a little surprised) to see her out walking.

In the regular room, there are literally no tubes or things connected to her. Her doc said that at this point, they just want to make sure things are healing well before they send her home. To that point, they did an MRI this afternoon to check and see how things look post-op. This will show them how things are settling back in place. (ok, I made that last part up... but it´s logical right??)


The BEST news of all is that they are thinking of releasing her on Wednesday! It´s not definite, but seems to be a reasonable goal given her progress.

We brought Katie with us today and she enjoyed seeing her ¨Nana¨. She had seen her briefly the day before, but we´re careful to only expose Nana to Katie´s energy in small doses, under the circumstances. They both enjoyed seeing one another. Katie´s eyes BUGGED OUT of her head when she noticed the incision on Mom´s neck/head. We had hoped she wouldn´t notice, but she did! It wasn´t a big deal... we´d told her many times about Nana´s "bump" in her head and that it was being removed. Tonight she told me felt sad that Nana is sick, but was glad to be able to see her today.

Speaking of the incision. It´s a biggie. However, it´s interesting how well the surgeon cut her hair. She has a large spot that was shaved... but he left a large amount of longer hair above the incision that covers all but a couple inches of it. Her hair looks pretty normal (meaning, "good" :-). My sister commented today that if Mom wears a collared shirt, it´d be hard to know that anything happened back there. It´s a nice benefit to not have a crazy haircut coming out of this...

Tonight, we returned to Mom and David´s house. It´s hard for me to work in a hotel room without disturbing Katie and Becca, so being here in the mornings will be good. We also wanted to return here so we could make sure things were in order for her to return. I´ll work some tomorrow morning and then go up to the hospital to see her. It´s about a 50 minute drive each way. David is staying with her again tonight. He´s a real trooper.

Thank you all again for all your prayers and love for Mom and our family. She´s beginning to feel some of the emotions from all this and is sooo thankful for your love for her. Grateful, grateful, grateful. A big, beautiful bouquet of red roses arrived from her office. She loves red roses (hey, who doesn´t?) and is honestly a bit overwhelmed with gratitude to so many of you.

Thanks again for reading what is a bit of a novel tonight. :-)

Jason, Becca and Katie with a bunch of sleeping dogs and one screechy (!!) bird