Angie & Jim

Ray of Hopeby Jim

The last 24 hours have been very encouraging.  Now that Angie is on an unrestricted diet and she’s had some fluids, she’s feeling much better.  She still isn’t walking yet, but I don’t think it will be much longer before she is.  She’s stood for a few minutes at a time by the bed (and plugged in for monitoring) and hasn’t had any problems yet.  This morning I finally had enough appetite to eat a regular breakfast.  I think the plan is to still do the hepatopulmonary syndrome test today, just to make sure, but I think the general consensus is that it will come back negative.

Angie had some x-rays this morning and they wheeled her away in a wheelchair and she sat the whole time without difficulty.  She was on oxygen, of course, but she’s been trying to sit up a lot over the last day or so.  Angie is very goal oriented when she wants something.  Ever since the doctors gave her some objectives, she’s been working hard.  She’s anxious to get home, so she’s going to press the doctors this morning to give her a list of things she has to do before she can go.

On Monday, when things were looking pretty glum and Angie wasn’t getting better (and slowly getting worse), I was starting to get a bit discouraged.  When they took her away to do the catheterization for the second time to look for shunts or other problems, I was sitting in the hospital room looking out the window.  We have a magnificent view of the construction just across the way.  We’ve watched over the course of a week as they made slow progress on the new building.  The workers had gone home for the day and the site was deserted.  The sky was starting to look gray with dark clouds across the sky.  The gloom reminded me of the despair I was feeling inside.  As I looked out, I saw a beam of light peeking through.  I thought about the desperate bit of hope I felt and how similar it was to that little beam of light against the dark sky.  I admired it and then went back to my laptop.  A couple of minutes later, the clouds broke is such a way that the sun shone directly into the window and light streamed into our room.  I looked up at the sun through the window and the light was so bright that I could hardly see the dark clouds that filled the sky.  It was a beautiful moment.  I knew there were still things we would have to get through, and questions we still needed answered, but somehow I felt a little better about it.  Several more beams of light shone through the clouds over the 30 minutes or so and so I snapped a picture with my camera to remind me of the experience.

Thank you all for your kindness and support during this difficult time for us.