A Little complication- back in the hospital for emergency surgery

It will be a small surgery. I should be back home later this afternoon.

Two shadows take a walk

Margie joined me on a short walk yesterday. It was sunny and warm and we cast good, strong, shadows.

I just returned from a short walk today. It was overcast and gray. I walked alone, cast no shadow and took no picture. As far as blogging goes, this is all I am good for today.

I don't think I will be good for much tomorrow, either - maybe nothing. Maybe Monday, I will tell you about 800 Sarah's Way, Wasilla, Alaska. Maybe one of these days soon I will string together several of my hospital pictures and launch my own diatribe into the current health care debate. Maybe not. It will take a lof of energy and won't make any difference, anyway.

But maybe. We'll see. No promise. Now I will go lay down on the couch with Jim and veg. Maybe I can pass out for a couple of hours, Jim purring on my chest.

A Fourth of July that seemed never to have happened; another from years back, at 800 Sarah's Way, Wasilla, Alaska

Today being the sixth of July, it stands to reason to believe that just two days ago, it was the Fourth of July. I have no sense of the Fourth ever having taken place this year. I remember experiencing this one, when Lisa got to walk around our back yard here at 800 Sarah's Way, Wasilla, Alaska, waving sparklers and casting, tiny, sizzling, fires here and there.

Well, things look a little grim right now, but I am cooking up a little plan involving this place, 800 Sarah's Way, Wasilla, Alaska, and the life we have lived here these past 29.5 years - a plan to cast the experience into digital and paper stone and preserve the memories forever, even as perhaps we might find ourselves with little choice other than to walk away from them.

This idea came to me awhile back. Before I went into the hospital for surgery, I put together the images for an explanatory post and put them up in draft form, with no words. My plan was to write the words from my hospital bed and publish the post from there, too. But I drastically overestimated how much energy I would be able to muster for such tasks. 

Drastically.

And I don't have it now, either. I don't have the energy to write emails, to make comments in Facebook... this little effort, to put these few words here, I am finding to be totally draining. Please do not picture me as an inert lump. I've got tasks I must do to get my body working again and I go at those tasks gung ho! I am working pretty damn hard.

But once I do a round, I just can't do much of anything else.

I really must stop now. I will share the 800 Sarah's Way, Wasilla, Alaska, scheme later.

In the car with Margie, going home

As vital as the hospital is to one's recovery, at a certain point it switches and becomes a liability. I realized I had absolutely reached that point at dinner last night. My body must now relearn to process solid food and it struggles with the task. Every bite of my dinner that I managed to eat was just awful.

If I am to get well, I need to eat good food that won't make me sick. I need to hang out with my wife and cats and get outside and not see a city around me.

The nurses and doctor were all in full agreement. They know how awful hospital food can be. A couple of nurses engaged me in highly intellectual discussions on the healing powers of cats.

So Margie came and got me. Now she is driving me home and I am posting from our car through my iPhone. This has been an exclusively iPhone series. I don't know how I would have done it without my phone.

No cancer!!!

Dr. O'Malley brought the pathology report to me. Not a single cancer cell was found in the polyp or in the colon. Such a relief! No chemo will be needed. I wish we could've got it earlier, before it turned into an $80,000 removal process. But still we got it in plenty of time to save my life, and for that I am most grateful.