recovery time

On Monday evening, when I walked into the recovery room, Erik opened his eyes, looked at me, and said, "Emily, you'll never believe the dream I had! We bought a farmhouse in Vermont, and ran it as a B&B..."

(If you don’t know why that’s so funny, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwYw2i2icNg and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newhart#.22The_Last_Newhart.22 )

Since then, life has been a steady parade of various tubes, monitors, nurses taking vital signs every 4 hours, and that sort of thing. I meant to post before now, but time has slipped away, and there hasn’t exactly been any “news” to report. Erik has been healing nicely, and his numbers on all the things there are numbers on seem to please the medical staff. Most of yesterday, he was having some bad pain in his shoulder, which they determined was due to his chest drain, but that was much better by this afternoon, which was a relief. He's not allowed to eat or drink anything, even sips of water, until his stomach has healed up enough--hopefully Friday--which is rough. He's "eating" with his J-tube, and hydrating with an IV, and can use a wet swab to keep his mouth happy as long as he doesn't swallow any of the water.

They want him to be up and moving as much as he can, which has translated to a couple of walks around the area of the hospital his room is in yesterday, increasing to 4 walks today--each walk is about the distance of a short city block or so.

The nurses here at Dartmouth-Hitchcock have been absolutely phenomenal--competent and kind, truly listening to what one has to say, and never giving us the sense that there’s somewhere else they need to be, though Erik is obviously not their only patient.

Cameron and my dad drove down from Cabot for a visit yesterday evening, which was really nice. We had some dinner from the hospital cafeteria (quite decent food at very low cost), and Cameron joined in on the evening walk. Cameron and my mom are going to visit tomorrow evening, and a couple of other friends earlier in the day.  

Overall, Erik's in pretty good spirits, though awfully tired most of the time, and yearning to eat and drink again. We anticipate the tube count going down by at least one tomorrow, which will definitely feel like he's getting back to normal!