Sitting in the Sun

It's indeed good to be home, and to add to that to be able to sit on the porch in the sun for about an hour today around noon without being cold.  It's been a great week of unlikely February weather, most of which we missed, of course, but tomorrow we go back to a week of rain.

Ed is using less pain medication than previously, seems less groggy, took several walks around the property, and, alas, continued the hiccoughs/hiccups.  He slept well last night, but was unable to sleep this afternoon, which might be just a function of getting more sleep at night.  We are living in the House of Tapas, sort of, as I figured that it would be easier for him to eat if we had lots of tiny meals, and that has indeed proved to be the case.  It's one thing to figure out a dinner every other day (which would be my normal job, since we normally alternate cooking dinner), but now I am figuring out 4 or 5 meals a day.  A cup of tomato and kale soup, with kale picked from the garden, was served at 2 pm, and by a 'cup,' what I actually mean is about 1/3 of a cup.  Little squares of bread with melted cheese on them.  A quarter of a banana cut in a dozen small pieces.  Things like that.  Breakfast of a little bit of Scottish oatmeal and 2 orange slices cut in small pieces.  It's sort of hard to figure out whether it's enough food, but he is able to eat it, anyway.  And I am able to share the meals with him, which I couldn't really do in the hospital.

This morning to early afternoon, the hiccups were very intermittent, as they were last night, but since around 3 pm, they have been almost constant.  We've talked to several doc friends, all of whom say, you just try things and nothing works consistently and some things work for some people, which makes it sound like mostly placebo responses.  Our neighbor Lorinne will provide a Healing Touch session tomorrow and maybe it'll heal the hiccups.

I think we're both okay on sleep; but for Ed the ordeal and assault of surgery is still to be recovered from, and he is not used to that feeling of weakness.  And the underlying stress of it all is something that we really have not had in our lives for all these past 18 years; not even in small ways.  So we are probably out of practice. 

We watched a movie tonight, for distraction as much as anything, called 'In the Loop.'  It's a comedy, sort of, and British, I believe, about the way in which the Iraq war began.  It is funny, in that heart breaking way that funny has become when it touches even lightly on the disaster that our government has become.  It is a dark and sad view of what (and where) we have come to.  Sadder yet to think that such a theme would be distracting.