Back home

Michael writing. We could have stayed the night in the recovery room, but chose to go home instead, a decision we made about 4pm and left the hospital about 7. The main upside of this was being with the kids, tastier dinner, and possibly better rest.  The main downsides was the drive home (20 minutes or so, not too bad), no hospital bed that can be easily adjustable in hundreds of ways, and the possibility of being tempted to do too much.  All of the upsides were really up, and the downsides were not too bad, though we had to try many different resting places and positions with pillows acquired in expectation of this and additional pillows in the house.  

Cat fell asleep on the couch after a yummy dinner provided by friends (thanks LBs!). The idea was to take a short nap and then maybe watch some TV as a family.  The short nap was turning pretty long and she was deeply asleep, so I told the kids we might just be done for the night and then fell asleep myself.  Before turning in, I changed all the settings on my phone to allow notifications from Catherine only but silence everyone else, but my level of slumber was too much for that, and awoke to one of the kids knocking on the door saying she was ready to watch TV or maybe take some tylenol or something.  So we watched our show (Welcome to Wrexham, the episode was "Life or Death" - whew!) and then went to bed around 12:30, setting alarms at 1:30 and 4am to take more OTC pain meds.  

Then we slept until 10am only getting up for meds.  Cat isn't a back sleeper, so it's yet another thing to get used to, and she said her back was more sore from the same position all night than her incision sites.  Once up, she had some coffee and breakfast, then napped on and off for much of the morning, with the only real things to keep an eye on being the OTC pain meds and eventually clearing the drain from the surgery (there's only one).  Lunch was a leftover quesadilla from last night, a salad (veggies being highly recommended by the doctors), and some ground turkey I'd made a couple of nights ago with various sauces from takeout.

Afternoon was more naps (for both of us), and two friends came by for short visits.  Cat is really enjoying getting texts from people, and if she is in a space to read them, she does, but if not, they just wait for her.  And she's not feeling a ton of energy to reply to all of them, but they still reach her really well, letting her know you're thinking about her and care for her.  So keep them coming - she's shared a lot of them with me (the old fashioned way by handing someone your phone, not forwarding/screenshotting them).  After a delicious hot dinner (from the same Thai place that we went our first night in town when we moved here 16 years ago - thanks Liz!), she's asleep on the red couch and her wish just before closing her eyes was for me send out some of these thoughts and the events of our life today.  Thanks to you all for your support and care!

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