I'm home!

I'm home! Sorry for missing that update. Here's what you've missed:

• midnight Friday/Saturday: detached my tubes from suction. they were still attached to some little fluid-gunk-measuring machines, but those machines were no longer attached to the wall.
• 5am Saturday: x-ray (yes, that is the standard xray time. I had one at 5am almost every morning). It showed my lung was still up after 5 hours of no-suction - yay!
• sometime later that morning: they pulled my tubes and stitched me up. HURRAH!
• soon after: I had this one drug that was like an epidural, but it was hooked up to my back in a continuous stream plus I could give myself more if I wanted. it ran out. instead of refilling it, they said, your tubes are out, you should be fine, and pulled it. (I was fine, so that was good). now the only medical equipment in me was my IV line.
• about 5 hours after pulling the tubes, 1pm-ish, another xray to check if my lung was still up after pulling the tubes.
• waiting for the x ray to be read, waiting... waiting...
• 2pm-ish: it's good! time to take out the IV and get discharged!
• later that day: sleeping at home in my "lung chair" that my parents bought for me back in 2008 w/ my other lung surgeries. :)

Sunday

• sleeping at home
• I have not showered or bathed in a week, and I am not allowed to shower for a few more days (or bathe for a few more weeks) so I call and make an appt to get my hair cut, just so that they will wash my hair really well in one of those sinks. my mom takes me. we go for a very short, very small walk afterwards which totally wears me out.
• I come home and nap.
• Evan and Alyssa are having dinner w/ my parents that night before heading back to CA. We go over too because I can just nap there if I need to. It goes well and I stay awake the whole time!

Monday

• Blake stays home to watch the kids and me. I take a couple naps, and at one point try to go too long w/o pain meds and learn that that was a mistake. Sarah, from a mom's group at church that I'm a part of brings us food. Dylan, a kid I just finished tutoring (going to SCU next year!) comes to visit me and brings books and chocolate for me! Audria and her kiddos come over for a playdate which is super fun 'cuz I haven't seen her in awhile and my kids haven't seen other kids in awhile either. I get two deliveries of beautiful flowers from relatives. :)
• Overall, I feel much better on Monday than either blake or I was expecting me to. yay!

Tuesday

• Today! Blake's first day back at work. Charlotte comes over to watch the kids. Who's Charlotte you ask? Well, my brother darren (8 yrs younger) has a very good friend Thomas (1 yr younger than him), and Thomas has a sister Charlotte (just finished her soph yr of hs). They live in our neighborhood, so this is pretty darn awesome because she can walk over to our place. Thus far today, she has been GREAT w/ the kids, and let me take a nap once everyone was settled. I'm not allowed to pick the kids up (doc's orders) so she's done all that and fed them lunch and the whole deal. Later today someone else is bringing us food and Danielle's bringing us groceries (like milk and bananas) and then coming over to hang out for a bit before she heads off to Extreme Week w/ the high school youth group. There may be another nap in my future, or maybe not, we'll see, but overall, it's been a good day thus far!

That's the update thus far! Enjoy a few pictures of our dinner w/ Evan and Alyssa and one from K&E and Audria's kiddos B&C jumping on the beds yesterday!

uncle evan is so silly. my fav thing about this picture is that ethan is (appropriately) weirded out by getting his shirt/tummy nibbled, but kaylee is like, "my tummy? my tummy? please do me next!"

yep, kaylee figured out she had a lot of people who were willing to throw her around if she just rotated who she asked.

drum lessons from uncle evan

ethan, kaylee, ben, and claire!

Back in bed

Dana's surgery went well.  She's back in bed, with no pain, but some "miserableness".  But Dana is smiling when she says "miserableness".  We've also got pictures of her lung:-)

In the OR

Dana asked me (blake) to post updates to her adoring public.  She went into the OR a few minutes ago.  Everything seems fine.  Thanks everyone for your support!

surgery plans

Looks like the plan is surgery tomorrow early afternoon, both talc and abrasion. it would seem that all the medical professionals think this is the best plan, so we're going with it. I haven't quite signed the consent papers yet, but I think that's likely to happen this afternoon and then we'll finally have a plan. I like plans. after surgery we expect me to be in the hospital for about 3 days, and then go home sometime over the weekend probably.

I was a little emotionally exhausted yesterday; worn down by the tedium of waiting and the unknown, but I'm feeling better today. physically I feel fine. my pain is less and less and my chest tube leash (that's attached to the wall) has been extended (they put another section of tubing in it to make it longer) so now I can make it as far as the bathroom in my room all by myself. this is actually pretty great, as it means I can get out of bed and brush my teeth, get out of bed to reach the laptop if it's been set on the counter, reach the dark chocolate covered pretzels (although not for long, I've eaten most of them now) etc, all without calling a nurse. the nurses are nice, but it's extra nice to just be able to do things for myself.

anyways, that's my update! thanks for your love, prayers, and support. and especially to those who have babysat for us - it's very appreciated!

Oh no pneumo

Dana's lungs have been acting up a bit.  She had an x-ray on Thursday, and on Friday Dr. Madsen said that it's time to take care of her left lung again.  So today we went to the hospital and Dana won the grand prize: a chest tube!  All things considered, she is doing well.  She'll be in the hospital for a while longer: until her lung heals and the doctors can perform another pleurodesis.  Many thanks Jackie, Dave, Brianne, Danielle, and Heidi for watching Ethan and Kaylee today.

campsites (kayak trip pt 2)

want to see where we camped? okay, here you go. two panoramic views of our campsites. saturday night on Jones Island and sunday night on Posey Island. To see the images better, click on them to open them in their own window and then zoom and scroll back and forth.


Jones Island (see it on a map)

people in this picture: dave and jackie, evan and alyssa, evan and alyssa (can you find them twice?), jackie dave danielle tim rp ian tara. I just find it amusing that people are in there multiple times since they walked through my picture taking.

Posey Island (see it on a map)

no repeat people in this pic, but here they are: danielle, blake (sleeping in the tent), evan, jackie and dave

We're back! (kayak trip pt 1)

We're back from our great kayaking adventure! In 2009, 7 of us went on a 4 day kayaking trip around San Juan Island. It was so awesome that we decided we wanted to do it again sometime. But in 2010 Jackie and Dave got married (and we had babies), in 2011 Evan and Alyssa got married (and our kids were only a year old), but this year we decided to just do it (lots of thanks to both blake and my parents for babysitting all weekend)!

The 2009 group was me, Blake, Brianne, Danielle, Jackie, Evan, and Darren. We also had 4 strangers on our trip plus a guide, Tim. In 2012 Darren was lame and didn't join us again, but everyone else came again, and Alyssa and Dave joined us as well, so we were a group of 8. Tim, the guide/owner is transitioning from guiding to the office-work part of ownership (he's old-ish), and this was his last 3 day trip, so he brought along 3 guides-in-training for their last training run before he sends them off to lead trips on their own.

My initial idea was to post 10 pics from each day, but I took a first pass at that for the first day and now I'm too lazy to narrow it down to just 10 pics. So here are 18 pics from the first day. Enjoy!

Jackie and Dave on the ferry ride over to San Juan Island

Alyssa (and Dave) sitting in the kayaks on land adjusting pedals and such before we launched

Blake on the water!

lots of seals

one of the islands we stopped at (I think it was Turn Island?). those are our kayaks below; we're standing at the top of a hill that we hiked up before hiking around the island.

dave, jackie, danielle, evan, alyssa, brianne, rp (guide), tara (guide), ian (guide), tim (guide)

Yellow Island. another island we stopped at to take a little hike and gather firewood. Yellow Island is a little funny in that it has a few rules. Like you can't eat on the island, so we all sat in our kayaks and snacked a bit before landing on the island, and you have to get to the island before 4:00pm. We arrived in the area around 3:55, so we snacked quickly, and then landed at 3:59 so we could go on our hike and then leave again.

We spent the night on Jones Island. We had a campsite reserved so we set up camp and started making dinner.
In this pic we have Tara (guide) in the green shirt, then Alyssa, Ian (guide), and me. Ian and I were in charge of buttering the bread. Complex work.

RP serenaded us as we prepped dinner. Sometimes he sang "real" songs, but most often he sang Flight of the Concords songs which were, of course, very funny.

alyssa slicing tomatoes for the salad

pasta, pasta, and more pasta. tim asked if we wanted 4 or 5 boxes of pasta (for the 12 of us) and people answered 5 boxes. so we ate a lot of pasta.

in fact, 5 boxes of pasta may have been too much. evan volunteered to finish it off and that may have been an unwise decision.

after dishes, we all relaxed and sat around. evan's hammock didn't want to stay up, so he lay in it like that.

then we bundled up and hiked around the island to watch the sunset. which was behind the clouds. but we still had a nice little hike.

alyssa and ev on the sunset hike