Breakfast in the Step down Unit: The first thing you will notice about this picture is my beautiful wife. She is smiling and eating breakfast with us. What you don't see is that she was up much of the night. The reason is because she was so itchy. Her morphine dosage was a little to high. She had relatively little pain, but as previously mentioned, she was so itchy she would wake up every few minutes and scratch herself. Also the stepdown unit was quite noisy as most of her roommates were coughing and gagging throughout the night. In the morning hours she got more sleep (they lowered morphine dosage, and now later they changed her medication, also, it got quieter), and I really hope she is sleeping now. One thing that also makes the night hard for sleeping is that her blood pressure was alarmingly low, we're not sure why it happened, but it's a repeat of the night following her previous lung surgery. Possibly just with time or because the morphine dosage was lowered Ramona's blood pressure is back to normal.
The second thing you will notice about this picture is that I am drinking the superior coffee.
The third thing you keeners will try to figure out is how many lines and hoses Ramona is attached to (today and tomorrow are almost a constant process of removing medical devices from her) (go ahead, zoom in on the correct apparatus and try to figure out if Ramona still has airleaks in her lungs)
We talked to the resident doctor this morning. He said that optimistically Ramona is out of the hospital tomorrow, but more realistically she is out on Saturday. Also, the tumor that they could not find in her lung was only 2mm in diameter. Since Ramona is likely doing chemo now, this isn't something to worry about at the moment.











This is Nhung. She is one of the amazing nurses in the Stepdown Unit. For those of you trying to picture this room, it has four patients in the room with two nurses assigned to these four patients. On the above picture you see Ramona on the left side of her bed, she is sitting two feet and one curtain width away from her neighbor. The desk that Nhung is sitting at is 4.5 feet away from the right side of her bed.
Thankyou for reminding us that you are praying. Ramona will be exhausted trying to recover from this surgery. The challenge will be to build emotional stamina for chemo in the middle of the recovery now.
-Earl