Saturday, January 13th, 2007

Christmas Day... Bridget comes to the hospital for a visit with her Mommy! It was great!!


Hi gang!! Wow... can you believe it??? I'm now home and actually able to post to the blog myself! I can't thank Melinda enough for having set up the blog and passed on the updates... and I also thank all of you who have contributed by sending information to Melinda to post on the blog. How cool is that?? A total universal experience where folk from Vancouver can send information to Australia and that information can be posted so that everyone who knows me can have access to the information, no matter where they live. And by using the blog, we aren't cluttering up anyone's mail inboxes. :)

So, from here on in, you get to read my babblings!! Hahahaha! And babblings they will be because I am not known for writing short, to the point posts . Dave, if you are reading this, I am baaaaaaaaaack and full of words coming out of these fingertips!!! I'm lucking that we don't type with our stomachs... I'm sure I would be struggling to type any words right now if we did. But they left my fingers alone in the surgery so you all get to put up with my babble'ness :)

Yes.... I came home yesterday (Friday, Jan 12th) in the morning. Steve O. and Don C. came to the hospital to pick me up. By that time I had gotten in touch with a few neighbours (Fern, Eric, Mimi and Nathan) who came on separate trips to pack up my room with all the wonderful plants, flowers and of course, the Friendship Wall and take them home. Poor Tomas, who went in to tidy the apartment and have it ready for my homecoming, had to deal with all the plants, balloons, etc. But gol' darn it, if he didn't work magic and the plants all have a home now. So now the apartment looks like a mini-greenhouse/florist shop!! :D

Getting home went really smoothly. Don brought the car to the Thurlow Street entrance, so Steve and I just had to go down the elevator and down a short hallway to get to the door and there was the car. Getting INTO the car wasn't too bad, except I couldn't lift my left leg high enough to get in... so Steve helped by grabbing the leg and throwing it into the front seat and then I could follow with the right leg. (hahahaha... ok, so maybe he didn't actually grab it and throw it, but you get the picture... I needed a bit of help). We stopped at the drugstore to fill my prescription for pain meds and then we headed home. Getting out was no problem. Going up the 8 stairs to my apartment was no problem either... so all in all, I was very pleased with how the trip went. I was expecting it to be way worse!

Mind you, once home, the whole routine changes from being in the hospital. Now I can sit up at the computer, or just putter about the apartment... which is a way more physical activity than I had been doing in the hospital while struggling with the pain and getting the pain management under control. But, I'm doing really well and when I get tired, I just go take a nap. It'll probably be another week or so before I can master the stairs and actually take walks outside... and that will be a long term plan of getting my stamina up again so that I CAN do my walking again. For the time being, I will be taking it super slow and being really careful to allow the insides to heal, even if I think I'm feeling better. That's the problem with me... when I think I'm feeling better, I am, only because the pain has fallen below my pain threshold... but that doesn't mean it's gone or that I'm healed, it just means I don't feel it like other people do. So I have to be extra careful.. and I will :)

I need to be healed and have my energy back before we start the next phase of this journey... which will be the chemo or radiation or both. At least I have a couple of weeks - 1 month to work on healing before we start that journey :)

Anywho... just thought I'd let everyone know that I am back and ready to heal!! Now, I'm going to try adding a few photos here in this post just to see if I can!! And I do encourage all of you who are reading to make comments. I have taken off the setting about having the posts monitored before they are posted. I figure we'll take our chances that spammers come in and put junk comments here... if they do, then I will reset the monitor setting. Some of you had problems adding comments, but keep trying. I believe all you have to do is click on that word about Comments, then it brings up a screen and on the right-hand side there is a place to type your comment and then click a submit button or something like that.

Will be back soon...

Cheryl