Penmachine

I've noted before how remarkable my wife is, both as a person and as a spouse. She's also amazing when I'm sick and when I'm not.

This week she had to deal with my being nastily ill once again: she not only shuttled me to emergency wards three different times and sat up with me there till insane hours of the early morning, but also kept the kids fed and clothed and schooled and loved, came to visit me with supplies (including some amazing lip balm), ran the house, went to work, and made sure everyone important knew what was going on with me.

I'm home now, but it was a gross week. After my overnight trip to Burnaby General Emergency (which wasn't too helpful) and visit to my oncologist (slightly more so), we went home. But I couldn't stay there. My intestinal pain got worse than ever (which is pretty darn bad), and we zipped down in the car to the emergency ward at Vancouver General Hospital instead—it is near the Cancer Agency, and has many more resources for handling both colon cancer and intestinal blockages.

I was at VGH for four days, and just returned home a couple of hours ago. During that time there was vomiting, lots of morphine injections, several X-rays, plenty of intravenous fluids, and no food or drink for the first couple of days. By Thursday things were improving. But man, overall it was brutal.

Now that I'm back on the couch in the house, I've decided to declare email bankruptcy for the week, purge my Gmail inbox (current count, 899 unfiled messages), and start over from scratch in the next couple of days. So if you emailed me recently, I won't reply now, sorry.

But I will get my wife some sort of nice treat in thanks for everything this week, that's for sure.

Labels: cancer, family, hospital, love, morphine, pain