Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

Holland's surgery is over. We're home and focusing on doing quiet activities for the next few days. The surgery was quick - only an hour. The doctor came out with a gross, but cool picture of his spine and where they cut. It's just incredible to be able to see (in color!) inside someone's body. The hardest thing for Holland wasn't being operated on, but lying flat after he came out of the anesthesia. (It took 2 hours for him to wake up. If he sat up too much, or moved around, he could get a spinal headache. I knew that he would have trouble with this. He complained almost the entire time. We were able to snag a DVD/Game Cube cart and he played that for awhile. But he really just wanted to get out of bed.

Monday night my sister and her family came to the hospital to visit. The kids had made cards and wanted to give them to Holland. My neice ("Ramona" on my sister's blog) wrote a very nice story for Holland. She even included blank sheets of paper so he could add his own pictures. If you were listening to this story, you'd be impressed wtih how many ideas she has. She loves to write about what's happened to her. If you were listening, you'd also miss the spelling of the word 'we'. Last summer their family got a Nintendo Wii (pronounced 'we'). Ramona uses 'wii' for 'we'. It's like looking at a teenager's spelling texting on a phone.

Holland had a nice visit with his cousins. He had been having trouble with the catheter tape coming off his leg (got a picture in your head of that, yet?) ouch. So when the kids were leaning on the bed, I told them to be very careful of the tube hanging down the side of the bed. Ramona asked what it was for. Holland's answer: "You don't wanna know." The adults got a good chuckle out of that!

The only real glitch in the two days there was a wake-up call at 4 a.m. Our night nurse came in every two hours to check vitals and see if he could still move his toes. We knew there was a possibility of sharing a room with another patient. But when our nurse came in at 3:50 a.m. and said she had bad news, I couldn't have predicted what she said. There was a new patient coming in that had an infectious disease. They didn't want us to have to share a room. So we packed up and moved to a room next door. I walked, half-asleep, into the room next door in my jammies, slippers and bed head, knocked over a garbage can and got back in the sagging bed 8 inches off the floor. (You really don't go to a hospital to recover. Well, maybe a mental hospital).

But we are so glad to be home, in our own beds (it's 8.30 and Holland's still asleep! yeah!). Thankful and grateful for all your prayers and words of encouragement through this.