Hospital Post 5

Thursday morning (I may be rested enough to use capital letters today).   11+ solid hours of sleep for me; although not so good for Ed what with the regular vital signs taking and some beeping with the leg stockings that awakened him, and then an IV bag beeping because it needed changing.  So he is not feeling as rested as I am, but he looks/sounds very good.  He's eating breakfast as I write; unfortunately, we neglected to tell them about the abomination that a cooked egg is to ed, so the nurse has gone off to replace the egg with some yogurt and fruit.  I'll eat the egg.

He is now onto oral pain meds.  He still has a IV line, but all the other tangle of plastic tubes that made moving something of a challenge yesterday are gone.   His voice is much better today (it was kind of raspy and very soft yesterday).  The surgeon is reported to be likely to make a brief appearance today.  And now, Katherine, a good friend and colleague from UCLA Medical School, has tracked Ed down by phone (well, docs know how to do these things) and he is talking to her.  A helicopter arrived during the night.

And an extra note:  Several of you have asked me, 'Why the title Palmyra Notes?'  Here's why.  A few days before all this medical world came to our attention, I was talking to my younger daughter about why I had named her Caitlin.  In the course of that discussion, I mentioned that I had briefly considered naming her Palmyra.  She responded to this: "Well, if you had named me Palmyra, everything in my life would be different."  And so, a few days later, when everything in our life did seem to be different and I had to name the blog something, I thought to that.

And also, thanks for all the emails received.  The world of instant communication is truly wondrous in such times.  Most of our internet use is doubtless irrelevant, but the portion that matters really matters.