And Now Comes the Tough Part

Happy 4th of July to all, especially all you firecrackin-poppin' 'mericans out there. Try not to lose a couple of fingers this year, okay?

Today is the 4th of July...

...the Good Doctor Mondo's 11th day in intensive care...

...the Good Doctor Mondo's 13th day in the hospital...

...the Good Doctor Mondo's 9th day on intubation/ventilator, and...

...the Good Doctor Mondo's 2nd day of relative awareness.

This is truly where it becomes difficult, for her and for me. For her, under a lighter load of sedation, she no longer has the luxury of going back under and losing her ongoing memories of this terrible experience. This is something she's going to begin to carry with her, going forward. When the nurses come to futz with her positioning, suction her mouth and the vent tubes, etc., not only is she going to remain exceedingly uncomfortable...she is going to be cognizant of it happening, and quite possibly remembering significant parts of it, too.

For myself, this is the most difficult part to watch. In fact, seeing her at this level of physical anxiety and stress is pretty much the worst thing I've had to witness since the last minutes before they intubated her last Friday.

The pace of recovery of the human body can be a fascinating, and yet frustrating, thing. My wife was simply so close to dying, that her body is taking an extremely long time to recover. While the pneumonia takes up less of her lungs, it is still there. At the most base levels of exertion (e.g., the nurses adjusting her positioning in bed), her oxygenation levels drop pretty fast. The positive is that her recovery time after each such episode seems to be decreasing...and that is the most tangible sign that she is improving.

The positive upshot of this is what leads the doctors to want to back off the sedation. That is, she's doing better. Not much better, but better. It finally took until a couple days ago for me to reach the point where I just knew my wife was going to live through this ordeal. And she will. But her road remains unfathomably long and hard. By all accounts, she's really not close to being able to be removed from the ventilator, and not close at all to leaving intensive care. So the vigil continues. And after that, all the vague hints I get from the medical staff are that it may even be a matter of a couple of months before my darling can come home. There's talk of telemetry wards, assisted care rehab centers, etc., but nobody's really telling me anything.

Sometimes, I wonder how we're going to cope. Her university and my employer have been wonderful thus far. But then, she's largely on a summer break, and my cases have slowed down, so we're not really missed yet. However, I have no idea what the future holds.

All I can hope is that this is not a mirage, and that my baby *is* getting better. I will be here for her no matter how long it takes.



In other news, one of our favorite distaff lawyers appears to have survived Day 1A of the Main Event with a fair bit more than double starting chips (or at least was there with 90 minutes to go). Go LJ!!!

I bought a small piece of her ME action last year and sadly saw her get outdrawn on and roached. Unfortunately, I wasn't really focusing on things, given my wife's issues right now, and missed out on my chance to back a strong player whose already barely missed one final table this year. I hope you guys out there didn't miss your chance. This may be LJ's year, and I'll say this much...she'd make the November Nine a heckuva lot more fun than Kelly Kim.

Oh, and Go Rockies!