<p>Yay! Next up, pastrami on rye! ;)</p>
<p>Great news, Donna! There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…</p>
<p>Outstanding!!!</p>
<p>Excellent news! Please take care of yourself and give yourself time to heal.</p>
<p>shhhhhhhhh I think we can here Ziggy purring -----kudos Donna, heal well.</p>
<p>Hope you got lots of groceries in the house, and that you’re also in the mood to have the Chinese restaurant deliver. Hmmmm – moo shu pork?? </p>
<p>Now that you’re home, Donna, you will bounce back fairly quickly, I am certain. One week until you get all your strength back, and two months until you’re back up to fighting weight.</p>
<p>DonnaL, glad to read that you are feeling better.</p>
<p>So glad you’re home…hope my card gets forwarded to you from the hospital. I mailed it Tuesday and never suspected you’d be discharged so soon!</p>
<p>Hooray for you! So glad you’re home in familiar surroundings!</p>
<p>Wow…I just discovered this thread tonight…read through the whole thing. goosebumps, then sick feeling in stomach, hope, despair, and now SO GLAD you’re home. I hope you have someone coming in to help you, even if just a bit, till you get some of your strength back. You are an incredible person…and once again, my faith in CC has held up. Add one more wellwisher to your list!</p>
<p>edit-post #365 … shhhhhhhhhhhhh, I think we can hear Ziggy purring …</p>
<p>Hooray for coming home. I’m sure that Ziggy is very happy to have you back where you belong.</p>
<p>Glad you are home. I am curious whether your rapid-I mean since your arrival at Sinai- has anything to do with the psychological comfort of being near home in NYC.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I think being close to home did make a difference. Just looking out the window of my room, and seeing New York, instead of being stuck in a subterranean emergency room complex in another country for six days, improved my morale tremendously. Whether that had anything to do with my actual improvement, I don’t know. Being in one of the very best hospitals in the world (top two? top five? does it matter?) for treating Crohn’s Disease and other gastroenterological illnesses, with doctors who knew me and medical personnel who spoke English, helped even more, I suspect. (This is hardly the place for a comparative discussion of Canadian and American healthcare, on which I am hardly an expert, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the nursing care at Mt. Sinai, language issues aside, was <em>far</em> more knowledgeable and technically skilled even at things like finding new veins for iv’s and new places to draw blood; the fact that my hands, wrists, and arms are still covered with massive bruises from all the unsuccessful and extremely painful attempts in Montreal and by the nurse in the ambulance, is living proof. I feel kind of like a strung out junkie, but if I go down to get the mail, I’m sorry, I’m not wearing long sleeves! Not to mention basic things like knowing to turn off the naso-gastric tube before giving me medicine to swallow, or knowing enough that when you give me medicine <em>through</em> the n-g tube, you’re supposed to inject it <em>towards</em> my stomach, not <em>away</em> from my stomach up the tube towards the collection bucket!)</p>
<p>Yesterday afternoon, I actually felt relaxed enough to take a nap from something other than being medicated or critically ill, for the first time in a very long time. Finally, I can start letting down my guard a little, I think. For all the help I got from others, I still always felt the greatest burden was on me to be as alert as I could at all times. You gotta be careful in those hospitals, you know!</p>
<p>Last night, a midnight snack of Ritz crackers and liverwurst. Not exactly Proustian, perhaps, but still quite evocative I must say, and it definitely lived up to the anticipation!</p>
<p>For dinner, I had some meatballs with marinara sauce from the local supermarket deli (I only ate half the package; I don’t want to stuff myself), and cooked some penne to go with it. Quite delicious, actually.</p>
<p>No rye bread for a while, unfortunately. My immediate nutritional advice is the opposite from what they give most people for healthy eating. No raw vegetables, no fruits, limited fibers, no rye bread – just white bread. Refined foods are good for me, it seems.</p>
<p>Lots of small, frequent meals are the prescription. Sounds good. </p>
<p>I hope my gastroenterologist lets me stop taking oral prednisone, following 10 straight days of iv cortisone, soon, and switch back to budesonide. More for psychological reasons than anything else, given what I know about the horrible systemic side effects I get from longterm prednisone administration. I was on it for seven years until my first intestinal surgery to take out my colon in 1983, and apart from the fact that it never really worked to keep things in remission for long, by the time I was done my face was swollen like a balloon, and I had red stripes all over the insides of my thighs (stretch marks), which are still there even now. A nice reminder!</p>
<p>Before the surgery, I made an appointment to go into the city on 7/27 to the Callen Lorde Community Health Center (my primary medical clinic for years, it’s probably the largest health center in the country primarily devoted to serving the LGBT community, ability to pay not being an issue) to see one of their gynecologists who has a lot of experience with women who’ve had surgery like mine. If I’m not up to going into the City yet by then, I will reschedule of course, but I admit I’m curious to get a professional opinion as to how things are going with the surgery. I have no real idea what it’s supposed to look like now in terms of healing, so, even though there are no problems I’m specifically aware of, who knows? </p>
<p>Separately, I just skimmed through this thread for the first time. Wow, a couple of ups and downs, hunh?</p>
<p>But if I talk much about any of that now, or for a while, I’ll just get agitated all over again. I don’t need that. (Last night, oddly enough, I had my very first anxiety dream since this all started, and it had nothing to do with my health: I dreamed that I was fired from my job for being away so long. It didn’t happen to be the same job I have in real life, even though it did seem to be some sort of legal job, but it still didn’t feel good! Real-world anxieties begin to intrude when one starts to feel better, I suppose.)</p>
<p>Thank you all. Knowing you were out there was a lifeline for me, especially when things were at their worst. I really thought for a while that I wasn’t going to make it, you know. I was frightened. I was pretty close to giving up at a couple of points, if it hadn’t been for thinking about James. Who was, as I’m sure I said, terrified and almost inconsolable for a lot of this. (I asked him last night where all the clothes and other things are that he brought back from Montreal with him so I wouldn’t have to deal with them. They’re still in the trunk of my car. Why? Because he thought I was going to die, and that actually bringing them upstairs and putting them back in my apartment would be bad luck. Tempting fate.) The saddest conversation I had with him from up there was when he told me that he’d gone to visit the park at the end of the dead end street where our house was, where I always used to take him when he was little, because he wanted to go sit on “our bench”: the very first bench on the path to the left when you enter the park, where he always used to run as fast as his little legs could carry him when he was a toddler, and when he was 2 and 3 years old, because that’s where we would sit and I would read to him, book after book. The bench is gone now, it seems. There’s a new one, but not “ours.” That made him cry too, and think it meant I was going to die.</p>
<p>Poor kid. He’s fine now, and happy out there in Chicago (although still trying to find some work for 10 or 15 hours a week, no luck so far, yes he should have looked before, but he’ll know better next time), and I can tell when I talk to him how relieved he is.</p>
<p>Even if I do wish that he’d done a little, ahem, better job than he did keeping my apartment reasonably clean and neat. Oh well. He was distracted.</p>
<p>Thanks again to all of you. You are all very special.</p>
<p>Liverwurst? ewww! But we’re so happy for you!</p>
<p>Wow, Donna, sounds like you have made great strides! Your writing is back to it’s brilliant “self” in such a short time! Nothing like metro NYC! ;)</p>
<p>Just sending my good wishes!</p>
<p><em>relief</em>!!!</p>
<p>Donna,
I’m going to celebrate your upgraded status by eating too much tonight! Wait a minute. I do that EVERY night. I’ll think of something else and let you know. :)</p>
<p>Liverwurst- yum. I used to have a liverwurst sandwich on Wonder bread at least once a week for school lunch. A little mayo on it, and I’m a happy camper! And a Tastycake dessert. I grew up in NJ and still miss the tastycakes which we cannot get here in Houston. </p>
<p>I am so happy to hear how much better you are doing. And what a wonderful son your James is. You and he rock. Keep on resting, improving and preparing for the next chapter in your life. </p>
<p>Love, Pipmom</p>