Recovery I

One of the two windows in room 3232 of the ante partum unit at St Joseph's Hospital in Milwaukee now has a small bouquet of flowers, our boys first gift to their mom, thanking her for undergoing surgery for them. Attached to the vase are two blue surgical gloves blown up with happy faces on them. The one on the left slightly larger.

Mom is doing well, she is resting, continually in and out of sleep. She is well medicated and hooked up to a host of machines, tubes and monitors. An epidural keeps her lower 5/8ths numb and an IV feeds her sugar and protein in a continually uninteresting meal. For now she says she feels like a koala bear: warm, fuzzy, unmoving, slowly reaching or asking for anything she needs. She occasionally mutters in her half sleep things like "nutter butters" then says oops realizing that she let something from her sleep world out into the real world. All of that belies the fact of course that her belly was cut open wide enough to pull her whole uterus out in order to do the surgery. An act of sacrifice that will always be with her. A reminder for the remainder of her own life of the love she has for these boys. A battle scar from the fight for their lives, regardless of the outcome of this surgery.

We will not know the outcome for some time. In 2 days we will have our first post operation ultrasound. We will not learn anything from this one except whether they are still with us. They will do ultrasounds every 2 days to check for progress, but we will not be likely to see much improvement until a couple weeks go by. It was unsettling for me today to do such an invasive surgery and have no conclusive findings at the end of it. Regardless, this surgery is judged by it's long term effects not an immediate result.

Personally I pretty well underestimated the effect of surgery on the party not being operated on. I have a completely new perspective on what this is like for our friends who are undergoing far more invasive scarier surgeries. As our hearts and minds are sometimes overwhelmed with emotion, fear, and critical decisions we feel the weight of our work of prayer shared, even fully shouldered by all of you. Again where we cannot, you can.

Our surgeon and literally every one of the staff that we have met at this hospital is amazing. We feel very human. They are compassionate, we truly feel like they personally care about our well being, even to the point of one of the surgery nurses giving me a big hug as I left the room before the surgery.

The next week will hopefully be "boring" and allow for us to catch up with so many of you who have been sending your love.

By the way, if the grammar and punctuation are deteriorating it is because my proofreader is on leave (and a whole bunch of opiates)