Update from Steph, October 20th, 2012

This update is from Stephanie.  It's been a while since we've written!  Thank you for your emails and calls, they are much appreciated.  We are sustained by the wide-flung community of support from you all.

Mom is still in the hospital, but getting ready to leave.  All the support systems are getting spooled up: home-care nursing, guest house cleaned, central line out, PICC line in, as many tubes removed as possible, monitoring of normal bowel movements (YAY! they are normal!), slow introduction of clear liquids, shift from TPN to tube feeding.  

There is still a lot of pain; Mom's incision is an impressive peace sign across her abdomen, and she is quite distended from the accumulation of free fluid from the long 12-hour surgery.  The distention makes her a little short of breath, and it is uncomfortable always.  But a CT scan shows that she is healing, and the doctors are happy with her progress, even though the pain makes Mom feel discouraged.  

On the up side, Mom is able to get in and out of bed with relative ease and no help, her GI tract is working well, and she is walking all over the hospital a couple times a day.  She has started with working out with weights and bands in her bed, and she is looking much more her normal self.  

I'll post again once Mom is home, I hope on Monday or Tuesday.  In the meantime, I want to thank all of you for your love, energy, support, well-wishes, and positive energy streaming towards my mom.  She is such a very special person, always ready to help others in need, and her support of us kids has been a mainstay in our lives.  One of Mom's friends, Christiane Ledakis, summed this up in a beautiful image I want to share with you all.

Gabriele,

Sending you prayers and loving wishes, from Spain still, where the white figs are ripening.

The blackbirds own exclusive rights to the top of the crown of the flourishing tree, to its upper, unreachable branches; they leave the low-hanging wealth untouched.

The figs are plump from the summer sun, and from prayers they overheard traveling on the breeze, and lines of poetry mumbled and scribbled across white pages, whiter than the skin of the figs that is a delicate pale green, their white undergarments shimmering through where the outer robe starts to split and crackle from the abundance they hold.  Sometimes they overflow and a drop oozes out and dangles like a dewdrop longing for the tip of a tongue to catch it.  Once in a while an impatient fig, unable to hold its loving sweetness, bursts open, bares its shockingly blood-red heart, and is transformed into a bizarre, luxuriant flower, large, juicy three petals spread wide.

The blackbirds turn this living sweetness into song; the poet turns it into words; the friend into fervent well wishes; the angel into blessings.

It's sweetness, Gabriele, traveling your way: your own lovingness, returning.


With love to all,
Stephanie