Hospital Party

Here's a picture of Daddy, nice and warm inside some hospital blankets.  The hospital is generally a cold place, which we understand completely.  It's so great to have those microwaved blankets put over you!  Note the oxygen tube - that's a first for Daddy.  Like I said, it sort of gets on your nerves pretty quick.  I'd say about day two.

Fortunately, there are good friends to drop by.

Here are just a few, which lifted Daddy's spirits immensely.  Daddy is eating green jello after a couple days of not eating anything at all, and believe me, that tastes like steak when you first get to have something of flavor in your mouth.  Previous to this, there were ice chips:  again, I was not permitted to eat or drink anything, so the ice chips were heavenly to me.  I had this big bag of them and was munching on them like they were popcorn.  Previous to that, there were the green mint sponges.  These are interesting, as I'd never seen these before.  They are green mint sponges on a stick.  You dip them in ice chips, and then put them to your teeth, sort of freshening things up a bit.  Again, the previous experience with any food or drink intake was zero, so these green mint sponges were treated like holy ice cream.

Notice the balloons above: everyone decorated their own balloons to take along.  One guy brought a Snickers bar, which I'll hopefully someday get to actually eat.  One friend heard about the possibility of a scorpion bite, so he brought one of those old lollipops with a scorpion inside it.  And then there was an old friend of mine, stopping by - with a can of Spam.

We tried to keep the atmosphere festive, although I do wish I had something to play music with me in retrospect.  Still, Daddy was watching old episodes of "Batman" and reading Terry Pratchett and generally relaxing as he could.

Other times were not quite as relaxing.  The pain medication - and this is a first - was causing hallucinations.  Nothing like you'd see on television, but I was interacting with the IV Tower at one point, which was serving as some sort of evil influence in my life, holding me down and telling me not to worry about things as it continued to torment me with unpleasant images and thoughts.  It was a long struggle, but I managed to bolt upright and announce, "Enough!  I don't want this."

I turned the lights on, and seemed to have won the battle.  But ever since then, it's been a somewhat unusual battle with drugs.  Daddy has no experience with them outside of the morphine given back when he first had kidney stones so long ago.  But something seems different about the drugs this time.  This new one was called dilaudid, and I'm a little wary of it.  It didn't even completely kill the pain:  nothing ever did, actually.  But they all did lessen it to a point where I could manage.

Mommy has been by every day of course, each time leaving Madison with Nana and Ye Ye.  It's always so good to see Mommy, and Daddy is always so grateful.  She's got so much to deal with, and on top of this, she's having to deal with Daddy being hospitalized.  No fun!  Sometimes she would come by, and the two of us would sit there in the room and simply fall asleep, she in her chair and I in the gurney.

Next week, we'll be back in the master bedroom...