This Sucks

My Dear Fellows & Dear Princess Normal,

Today started earlier than normal. I had booked a taxi to the airport for 6.15am, so that meant I had to be up and about, feed the cats, tidy the flat and all that stuff from 5am onward.

However, it all went like clockwork and just a couple of hours later I was in Caro's hospital room in Auckland waiting to pick her up. Bearing in mind that she's recovering from major surgery, I was expecting some white-faced little thing with a weak voice and half out of it on drugs.

It was more like there was a party going on in her room, and she was the guest of honour. Nurses were coming in and out, "CARO! How's it going!?!"

"It's great!" she told me. "It's like a holiday only people bring me drugs!"

It turns out that she's in very little pain and is their star patient. "Are you SURE you don't want more drugs?" they keep asking her. But Caro told them she's not in that much pain. Either she's got a very high threshold to pain, or Steph the Surgeon did the best balloon-animal trick ever with Caro's intestines.

Caro has five incision wounds on her stomach, all of which had fresh dressings applied, and then she was discharged. I took her to the foyer and got a taxi to our hotel where I ordered myself some room service. I'd had nothing to eat up to this point I might add, so those eggs looked AMAZING.

The fork was halfway to my mouth when...

"Uh-oh, one of my dressings doesn't look good."

So yes, one of the five dressings looked like there was a bit too much blood seeping through. It was nothing too dramatic, but you can't be too careful but geez those eggs looked good so it was probably nothing but on the other hand you need to be careful but those eggs were poached to PERFECTION but...

Sigh. It is hard being a good husband sometimes.

So I left my beautiful eggs and took Caro BACK to the hospital where she met up with Chris, her favourite nurse. He took one look at the dressing and said she was quite right to come back, but to be fair to him, he didn't know about the poached eggs.

Chris explained the dressing he had put on earlier was clearly not putting enough pressure on. "Don't worry, we'll soon have you trussed up like a Christmas turkey," he said. 
 
You know the way that kids wrap Christmas presents? So much tape that it is like the parcel has been varnished? That's kind of what Caro's stomach looked like after Chris was finished with it. 

She proudly informed him that she'd been farting up a storm. 

"I thought you'd be curing that," I complained. "What's that about?"

"Mate, if I could cure fartin'..." said Chris.

So we got back to the hotel room about thirty minutes later. Caro's dressing was fine from then onwards. And my eggs still tasted good cold.

We spent the rest of the day watching telly on my laptop. Caro has loads of drugs to take, and she needs to drink lots of water, but SLOWLY. She has been given these tiny little cups - like shot glass size - and she has to sip her water out of them. She also likes sucking on ice cubes.

Speaking of sucking. Today's blip is Caro's Ball Suck Thingy. Oh behave.

What you do is, you SUCK through the mouthpiece to get all three balls to stay at the top of the contraption for a few seconds. According to Chris The Nurse, this helps build up your lung capacity. I gave it a shot and you will be glad to hear that I totally suck balls.

Yeah. There were a lot of jokes like that today. "We should leave your balls out so we don't forget them." That sort of thing.

Caro also managed to eat a little bit of soup and was a complete trooper all day. As for me, I managed to fall asleep at 7pm for about 3 hours. Useless. I felt a bit bad considering I was supposed to be keeping Caro company when she was unwell.

But, like I said, it was an early start. Also I was worn out from sucking.

S.