TLC

Let me tell you a little story that illustrates why I think of nurses as angels on earth.

I was chatting with my nurse one afternoon at our “Care Center”, aka Skilled Nursing Care or SNC. I was bemoaning that the next day was my wife’s birthday and there was no way I could get her even a card. Linda, the nurse, volunteered that she would get me one. I said something about that being too much and I thought that was the end of it. BUT, next morning there was a bag hanging on my room door-handle. In it there were two cards, one comic and one lovey-dovey, and a cute stuffed animal, a black and white lion. The cards were perfect and the lion thrilled my wife too.

In the Army, medals are awarded for going above and beyond duty. Nurses simply earn a few more love points to cash in at St. Peter's door.

Day 3

Sorry I missed a day (yesterday). There is just so much to catch up on. We have arranged for a nurse to come in once a day to re-dress my "wound". And today I am expecting to have someone come in and arrange for more physical therapy. I have trouble with phys and occupational therapy. The exercises are so boring that I listen to all the conversations going on in the room and I lose count of how many silly exercises I have done. I simplified the process of trying to remember where I was and always start over at nine. I figure that there must be some statistical proof that nine is a valid average and it all evens out in the end.

Right now I have to go wrap plastic bags around my leg to water-proof the incision site so I can take a shower before before the nurse comes. Somewhere in there there is a logic to that sentence, but who cares? Also in ten minutes I have to take twelve pills and huff and puff on an inhaler to cure my wasted lungs.

I have cleared out the over one thousand e-mails and several hundred g-mails. Blogs remain a different story. I want to read all that I have missed instead of the heartless deleting I practiced on the daily mail from Penn State, the New York Times, etc. More later.

Home Sweet Home

Well, we beat the operations and nursing home one more time. We arrived back home on Thursday and are happily catching up on things. I saw some highlights of the decorations for the Beijing Olympic Games this morning and had the thought that the Olympic Games are replacing the World Fairs as "Show-Off " events for countries. Wish we could go, but I'll be lucky to get to DisneyWorld this year.

Just before I left for the hospital the 14th or 15th of April I upgraded to Mac's Leopard operating system. I've almost totally forgotten how to use it. If anyone sent an E-mail my way and had it returned, please try again. I exceeded the limit (1000) of messages received and the rest were bounced. Sorry about that.

More as the days go by. Incidentally, I had a birthday while I was gone, so I have to edit my template prose to read 83 years old. I don't have the faintest idea how to do that at the moment.