Home again, home again!

Hi all - I'm delighted to tell you Scott was discharged yesterday from Kaiser and he's at home now.

The wound vaccuum got to stay at the hospital, but he's still got quite the open wound on his abdomen. It used to be the size of a grapefruit; now it's down to the size of a golf ball. It's open but now mostly red and pink, with few or none of the green, purple, and yellow colors we saw in the hospital.

With the help of his heavy oral antibiotics, it is healing, slowly but surely.

He is changing his bandages at home (I didn't know Band-Aids CAME in the Jumbo size, but evidently they do!) and trying to avoid straining or further aggravating this, at least until it heals a little more.

He's pretty tired - is sleeping much of the afternoons and going to bed about 7 pm. He got up for breakfast with the kids this morning and went right back to bed after breakfast. I took the kids into the bedroom to say bye bye to Daddy before taking them to school.

What this means for you: there are some of you who are desperate to see him, take him to lunch, talk to him on the phone, and the works.

Hold that thought. Hold on tight, because next week he's going to be desperate to get out of the house and see you, go to lunch, talk on the phone, go to the movies, the whole works.

But I might suggest it would be wise to let him rest through this weekend. Let him lie low, drink his fluids, take his antibiotics, take his naps, and generally cope with the bundles of energy which are the delighted kids.

Email him or message him on Facebook if you must, but please hold the phone calls, visits and playdates until next week.

It appears that the way we got into this situation was doing too much, too soon after the colostomy closure surgery, and the only thing worse than doing that once is doing it twice.

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I am delighted to report I have perfected the art of being late.

Neophytes (this used to be me) are never late at all: they are the sorts of people who consult calendars, factor delays into travel time, arrive early, and instill the value of punctuality in their children.

Junior apprentices (this also used to be me) are late, sometimes by as much as an hour, but never without stress. They know they are late. They call to apologize for being late. They feel their blood pressure rise when delayed by traffic, the missing pink Hello Kitty sock, the gallon of ice cream left on the counter last night. They may even try to adjust their behavior (by, say, getting up fifteen minutes earlier) so they won't be late tomorrow.

But, as with so many things from playing the violin to making a souffle, perfection has quite a different veneer than these clumsy beginning attempts. I now get the kids to school two minutes late without breaking a sweat, and certainly without speeding, hurrying them out of the car, or sprinting up the stairs. We find the Hello Kitty sock; we clean up the ice cream; we even take the time to do Elli's hair in two pom-poms and affix the crown to Maggie's dolly's hair, and all of this with nary a thought of getting up earlier tomorrow and with never a wayward glance at the clock.

I am often two to three hours late to work, because I now walk the dog (or do a hospital pick-up, or attend Pilates class) after dropping the kids off and before opening my office door. I don't wear a watch. I return business calls within the week; I return personal emails within the month. (My taxes, however, will be paid on time, largely because they are the provice of our accountant. She's not as accomplished in late-ism as I am; evidently the IRS takes a dimmer view of tardies than I currently do. My hair is entirely another story, because the last time I had it cut was, I think, for my sister's wedding about six months ago...)

I will let you know if it is possible to go beyond perfection in this matter.

Stephen Hawking would think so. I read his "A Brief History of Time" book. There are the usual four dimensions of length, width, height, and time. I was delighted to learn in this book that they think there may be as many as ten or even twenty-four dimensions. Moreover, they think some of these may be very small, or curled up like the inside of a drinking straw. This is excellent news all around, because it now means

1) I am for sure not late, because the smarty-smarts like Hawking and Einstein say everything's relative; I'm simply travelling much slower than the speed of light and just a tad slower than you all

2) My keys are for sure not lost. They just keep slipping off into the seventeenth dimension and are probably at this minute curled up inside a drinking straw somewhere off of the planet Jupiter. They periodically make their appearances in my kitchen, in Einsteinian time, occasionally near the speed of light, but never quite fast enough to get the kids to school on time. We are simply asymptotically approaching the 8 am school bell, but like the heroines of Greek mythology, may be doomed to never quite make it.