Erik MH:

blog entries: friends

Tunes and tubes

Thursday was a pretty busy day, and Fri­day is con­tinu­ing in that vein…

Yes­ter­day star­ted with some med­ic­al stuff: Erik’s naso-gast­ric tube was removed in the morn­ing, which removed a sub­stan­tial source of dis­com­fort, though left a resid­ual sore throat. Unfor­tu­nately, that also meant the end of the mouth swabs, so he’s hav­ing a hard time talk­ing until he can drink water again. The tube feed­ings (star­ted on Tues­day) had ramped up to the tar­get rate, so they took him off IV feed­ing, and were there­fore able to remove one of his IVs — an uncom­fort­able one near his wrist.…

  

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Giv­ing thanks

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.…

  

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No news is good news…

Well, things have been quiet here this week in Lake Wobegon….

Really quiet, in a way, though my dear friend Andy came up from Boston for the week­end to shake things up a bit (hi, Andy!). It was good to get the men­tal juices flow­ing again: Andy helped re-shelve piles of books in the lib­rary — which was very wel­come! — but even more he acted as a ter­rif­ic sound­ing board to help me fig­ure out pri­or­it­ies for the Mordor pro­ject and for work­ing out backup con­tin­gency plans for vari­ous oth­er Tolki­en-related things I’ve been doing (a few of which are spelled out at Ver­mont Soft­works).…

  

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