Mirrored from Brave New Blog.

Our mailbox in the mailroom of our building has been the source of a small joke for some time now. Shortly after we moved in, the nice postman or postwoman put a label on the inside of the box with our names on it to make sorting mail easier when the bank of boxes are open. It initially had Adam’s name, my name and my maiden name on it. The problem is that this person used a nickname instead of my full name for space, and inexplicably chose “Kathy” even though I get a lot of mail addressed to “Kate”. I crossed Kathy out and wrote Kate above it to correct the mistake. After Piper was born and began receiving letters/gifts someone replaced the label and added her name…but still left my name as “Kathy Hirsch.” Sigh.

A few weeks ago we were scheduled to receive one of the last Harry Potter movies from Netflix. We waited and waited, and still no movie. The website claimed it had been delivered nearly a week before. Thinking that it got misplaced in the mail, we waited for a few more days to see if it would show up, and finally reported it “missing”. Netflix promptly sent out a new copy and we watched the movie, figuring we would never know what happened to the original copy.

This afternoon, Adam walked in the door of the apartment with a Netflix movie and envelope that had been laid outside our door. It was the missing Harry Potter movie! Someone had, apparently, opened the envelope, ripped off the sheet with our address on it, watched the movie and then returned it to us. It must have been delivered to the wrong box, and someone decided to open it up to see if they were interested in the movie. I hope they enjoyed it, and perhaps should be thankful that they decided to return it to us (although they could have just returned it in the mail and we would never have known what happened to it). Maybe the person delivering the mail the day it initially showed up got confused – the movie was addressed to “Kate” and not “Kathy.”

Mirrored from Brave New Blog.

(guest post by Adam)

While we were here in the hospital, our wee grey cat, Lightning, came to the end of a several-week decline. She’s had great innings, as the Brits say, and her slow-down over the last little while has been slowly breaking our hearts, even as we’ve been focusing ourselves more and more on the little person snoozing in the bassinet next to us, here.

We’re getting ready to head home soon, knowing that we’ll have to deal with both the emotional and physical traces Lightning left behind. She was an excellent friend, and I’m only sorry we couldn’t devote more to her passing. Despite the huge changes coming to us, we’re going to miss her something fierce.

Just a quick update before I fall into bed.

Adam is feeling better today. The breathing tube is still uncomfortable, but he is not in any pain. The sedation is pretty low, but he is handling it well. I walked into his room this morning and Kathleen announced that Adam had a brilliant idea. He wanted one of us to go home and get the laser pointer and rig it to a hat so he could use the pointer to spell out words more easily. Kathleen, bless her heart, went back to our apartment and searched for the pointer. After a few phone calls to me to ask for other places to look, I finally remembered where it might be and she was able to locate it. She then attached the laser pointer to a baseball cap and brought it back in. We made a larger alphabet board with some other words around the edges like higher, lower, suction, sedate, etc. It works really well. In fact, Adam is so fast we need one person to watch the letters he's indicating and another person to write them down so we don't forget what he's trying to spell out. Adam indicated that having a little more self-control kept the panic at bay.

He's more weak and numb in his arms and legs - what seemed to be receding has returned, which is frustrating. Adam's also having more trouble moving his legs. We think this is the Guillain-Barre, but we'll ask about it tomorrow on rounds to make sure the sedation isn't confounding that. He was able to have the ventilator turned down to just provide pressure for his own spontaneous breaths and a little distending pressure to keep his lungs open as he exhaled for a while today. During that time he was taking all breaths on his own without any back-up breaths from the ventilator, which was great. After 4 hours, he started to get tired and went back on a small rate, which provides a certain number of breaths per minute from the ventilator. Hopefully, he'll be able to go longer time on less support tomorrow.