Erik MH:

Bumps in the road

Sorry for the delay in post­ing an update — it’s been a week­end of ups and downs. In short, everything related to the actu­al sur­gery is hunky-dory, but all the gen­er­al recov­ery stuff has been rough. There’s lots going on, but most of it isn’t really stuff I want to post about (end­less details about bod­ily flu­ids, their meas­ure­ment and pro­cliv­it­ies, that sort of thing).…

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Tunes and tubes

Thursday was a pretty busy day, and Fri­day is con­tinu­ing in that vein…

Yes­ter­day star­ted with some med­ic­al stuff: Erik’s naso-gast­ric tube was removed in the morn­ing, which removed a sub­stan­tial source of dis­com­fort, though left a resid­ual sore throat. Unfor­tu­nately, that also meant the end of the mouth swabs, so he’s hav­ing a hard time talk­ing until he can drink water again. The tube feed­ings (star­ted on Tues­day) had ramped up to the tar­get rate, so they took him off IV feed­ing, and were there­fore able to remove one of his IVs — an uncom­fort­able one near his wrist.…

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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: You­Tube and Wiki­pe­dia.) …

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Suc­cess­ful surgery!

Just met with Dr. Fin­ley, who reports that Erik’s sur­gery went per­fectly, and he’s now in the recov­ery room. Now his main job will be get­ting up and mov­ing around as much as pos­sible, and healing. 😊

He has an epi­dur­al cath­et­er to self-man­age pain, which every­one says is a really good arrange­ment, as it decreases the need for oth­er med­ic­a­tion. They’ll start him on tube feed­ing on Tues­day, and they’ll see if he’s able to swal­low water (Erik’s been refer­ring to this as his “leak test”) on either Fri­day or Monday, depend­ing on how he pro­gresses, and he’ll be able to go home a little while after he can do so.

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Giv­ing thanks

This is Kar­en. Erik’s now gone into sur­gery, and I wanted to post a tale of gratitude:

Our fam­ily didn’t stop read­ing bed­time story as the kids got older — we just upped the con­tent to match their age level. We have been read­ing The Lord of the Rings for our story for about a year now, and by coin­cid­ence our her­oes entered Mordor about the time Erik was dia­gnosed, and the par­al­lels, extend­ing Erik’s meta­phor, have kept sur­fa­cing in inter­est­ing ways.…

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