Mortality IV---Home

It's an amazing ride to go into the hospital, let them knock you out and cut into you (it's for your own good!) and start the recovery process.

It's befuddling and beyond ponderable that all this goes well, perhaps best case scenario for the situation at hand. My pain was beautifully managed. A woman next door, not so much. The unequal distribution of that particular blessing sits in my soul and I wonder at my escape from the worst.

I keep saying I have no way to complain. I was in a topnotch hospital in a city known for topnotch hospitals. I have insurance. And if I find the initial business of waking up disorienting and if I don't like the feeling of narcotics in my body (another blessing?) and if the energy put into just sitting up or shifting in my bed feels like some kind of misery---I have nothing to complain about.

Blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace. Friends and doctors and nurses . . . with Mary, I hold these days and ponder them in my heart.

The grisly bits of it are that I had a 10-15 pound mass in my abdomen. On my pancreas, no less. They went in and took it out. It was a little bigger than a baseball. The pathology report on it is all clear. I just have to be careful lifting things for the next month or two, as my abdominal wall heals back up. And figure out how to sleep without a cat kneading my belly for at least a few days.

I'm about to spend my first night back in my own bed, full of gratitude and wonder. But for fun, here's some photographic evidence from the last week. Me on a "breathing treatment" (I referred to it as my hookah) something like the third day after the surgery.