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On Monday evening, when I walked into the recovery room, Erik opened his eyes, looked at me, and said, “Emily, you’ll never believe the dream I had! We bought a farmhouse in Vermont, and ran it as a B&B…”
(If you don’t know why that’s so funny, see: YouTube and Wikipedia.) …
Just met with Dr. Finley, who reports that Erik’s surgery went perfectly, and he’s now in the recovery room. Now his main job will be getting up and moving around as much as possible, and healing. 😊
He has an epidural catheter to self-manage pain, which everyone says is a really good arrangement, as it decreases the need for other medication. They’ll start him on tube feeding on Tuesday, and they’ll see if he’s able to swallow water (Erik’s been referring to this as his “leak test”) on either Friday or Monday, depending on how he progresses, and he’ll be able to go home a little while after he can do so.
This is Karen. Erik’s now gone into surgery, and I wanted to post a tale of gratitude:
Our family didn’t stop reading bedtime story as the kids got older — we just upped the content to match their age level. We have been reading The Lord of the Rings for our story for about a year now, and by coincidence our heroes entered Mordor about the time Erik was diagnosed, and the parallels, extending Erik’s metaphor, have kept surfacing in interesting ways.…
That’s either a good thing, of course, or it means I’m in denial about the surgery itself!
Again, though, so far so good: I’ve been on a liquid diet for the past two days (and a low-fat diet for the past week) in preparation for the surgery. Not exactly what I would choose, but Karen and Cameron have helped by making a delicious turkey broth and by puréeing some non-fat honey Greek yoghourt with some milk; these augment the Carnation Instant Breakfast and the yoghurt drinks.… But at least I can still have coffee, and I was able to enjoy a wonderful turkey dinner when we celebrated Thanksgiving on Friday.…
Some of you might know that my “new” plan for the “Mapping Mordor” chapter had been to get all toponymic research done before the surgery, so that I could simply write between then and Yule — submitting a text draft in late December (only six weeks late) and telling the editors how many graphic images I’d be supplying (and where they’d need to go and what size they’d need to be) — and preparing the graphics in January while the editors and lay readers were looking at my draft text.…