Third Day at Home

Things are going very well!

Physically, the little infection of the belly incision is responding well to the antibiotics and the dressing changes, the coughing is far less as Richard has learned to sit up straight or stand up when it is a problem. Slouching around on the sofa aggrivates it. (His lungs are telling him to give them space to expand!) Mother Teresa (one of our lovely Distric Nurses) was here with a colleague, Sister Sue who gave Richard a good going over and said his lungs sounded really clear. We think his coughing may be more a function of his recovering/reconnecting nerves in his throat area. The diarreah (Richard HATES me to blog about this...oh well, he isn't reading it!) has more or less gone as he is off the food bag and eating relly well.

Emotionally, yesterday was a bit tough and we were a bit weepy in the late afternoon. Gratitude, exhaustion, loss, fear of the future, processing the long days in intensive care under an oxygen mask...who knows what produces our emotional dips. But, we know they are a part of the process and a very important part to experience fully so that  we can move on to something else, most often gratitude, joy and love.

So many lovely cards and amazing flowers/blosoming spring plants arriving and affirming we are surrounded by love. Amazing! Wonderful, easy visits by friends and realtions make for a real healing atmosphere.

I've become (AM!) Nurse Ratchett with my black notebook full of charts documenting Richard's nutritional progress, medications, dressing changes, weight, temperature, feeding tube twice daily flush, loo habits, exersize regime, etc (can you think of anything else I should be measuring??) and orders to "sit down and eat" or "sit up straight".  All motivated by wanting a sense of well-being to be the norm. It's coming, slowly and steadily.