Folks, I couldn’t have written a script for this week with movie
writers.  Surgery went well, and I had much more energy afterwards
than I did for my November surgery. I was up out of bed and walking
the day after surgery, making it up to 25 laps around the nurses’
station by Friday.  I was able to pass the surgeon’s test of “eat and
excrete” today, Saturday, so they released me to go home.  The earlier
estimate was for Sunday or Monday, so I’m ahead of schedule.

Which was almost a bad thing.  In Cincinnati, we had an ice storm
Friday night into Saturday.  The roads are clear, but the county
trucks didn’t take care of our driveway very well.  The car is stuck
part-way up.  Can’t go up the driveway – no traction (there’s about a
quarter inch of ice on everything).  Can’t back the car down – it is
sliding too much.  So coming home from the hospital, I had to carry a
bag of groceries while walking through the weeds on the side of the
driveway. I’m still very happy to be home, and grateful to my
beautiful chauffeuse Bettie, who kept me safe.

This driveway thing puts a potential crimp in the plans to go to
church tomorrow.  I still think I’ll have the energy, but it has
turned into a logistics problem.  The temp is getting to fifty
tomorrow, which will melt all the ice, but it will still be below
freezing when we have to leave for church.

So we may try to back the car down in the morning, or we may choose to
worship at home.  Either way, there will be many thanks for God’s
goodness, in this as in everything else.

Thank you for your prayers and support.

PS from real-time Steve: we didn’t try to move the car in the morning.  Later in the afternoon, Bettie was able to drive the rest of the way up with no problems.

This applies.

41 And Elijah said to Ahab, “Go, eat and drink, for there is the sound of a heavy rain.” 42 So Ahab went off to eat and drink, but Elijah climbed to the top of Carmel, bent down to the ground and put his face between his knees.

43 “Go and look toward the sea,” he told his servant. And he went up and looked.

“There is nothing there,” he said.

Seven times Elijah said, “Go back.”

44 The seventh time the servant reported, “A cloud as small as a man’s hand is rising from the sea.”

So Elijah said, “Go and tell Ahab, ‘Hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you.’”

45 Meanwhile, the sky grew black with clouds, the wind rose, a heavy rain started falling and Ahab rode off to Jezreel.

It’s early Saturday afternoon, and I am most likely going home today. It was close, though.

The test for going home is to produce output from input. IF eat food AND produce output THEN go home. Simples.

And I had the first part of that IF clause covered. Friday night I ate the tilapia the kitchen provided, and got a little wise about second dinner. I went with a turkey sandwich instead of pizza. Tried for chicken salad, but got shot down – there may be celery chopped up in theirs. I added cheese and mayo to the turkey, but they told me up front I couldn’t have lettuce, tomato, onion, or pickles. I still enjoyed that sandwich, because I had ordered it all by myself.

A few hours later I was rubbing my belly instead of patting myself on the back. I hurt inside, about where the ostomy bag had been attached. About where the surgeon removed eight inches of my small intestine Tuesday afternoon. Oh, didn’t I mention that before? It’s because I didn’t know it. Apparently I was told on Tuesday, but it had disappeared into the fog of anesthesia (which can be a blessing). I only found out late Thursday. And Friday evening I am wanting to do things my way, and it hurts all night.

Saturday morning, and still no movement, so to speak. My surgeon comes in, very happy with how things look and sound, tells me not to worry. He will keep me in through lunch, make sure the meals stay down, and probably send me home. At least I get to order breakfast.

No, I don’t. While he is still talking, room service brings in auto-breakfast. Peaches? Scrambled eggs, fine, but no ketchup?? I’m unhappy. And I eat almost everything they brought. I believe that you reap what you sow, and I didn’t want to sow more painful “Steve gets his way” seeds.

Then about an hour later, the first hint of a cloud appeared (this is metaphorical). Kept getting closer and closer. Just like Ahab, I made preparations before the storm hit. When the floodgates opened, I was ready.

I showered afterwards, happy that my gut’s timing matched what I wanted. And I ordered my own lunch, preempting whatever they had planned.

Staying in here longer doesn’t bother me. We had an ice storm last night, and this gives them time to get the roads clear. Not sure about the driveway, but that’s a different story.

No doctor has come to see me this afternoon, so I don’t know when I will get out. And barring complications, I plan to go to church tomorrow. Praising God not just for what He has done for me this week, and not just for what He has done for me in eternity – I will praise Him because He is good, and worthy of my praise.

Much better sleep last night. I slept very well, sleeping through the manic beeping of an unhappy drip machine, and dozing through blood pressure checks. A new doc saw me at 5AM, said I would be eating real food today and probably going home today, too. But that wasn’t what my mature surgeon had told me the day before, and it wasn’t what he said when he saw me after 8. I want to be off the drip machine, and I really want to be wrapping myself around some real food. I am quite happy, though, to take things slower and only do them once.

I did get to have full liquids for Thursday supper. That means that instead of beef broth (which I am convinced that they make with distilled water, brown food coloring, and two grams of meat per 500 gallon batch), I got to have tomato basil soup, which is very good. They actually use salt. And they brought a second bowl , which I also ate. And they brought me coffee and jello and milk, which I declined. I talked to the nurse, who set things up so I could order my own food. Except that breakfast showed up automatically, with bad cream of wheat (white sugar helped some, but not much). Talk to a different nurse and get the food thing straightened out. Except when I call to order lunch, they tell me it’s on order. And includes tomato basil soup. But I talk to the cafeteria directly, and it’s all sorted out. Good, since my surgeon just allowed me low residue food.

Except that I just now had tilapia delivered for supper, when I was planning on pizza.

And if this is all I have to complain about, I am blessed indeed. Which I am.

My surgeon also said I would be getting out Saturday morning, when the original estimate was Sunday or Monday.

So hopefully Saturday’s note will be the last one.

Praising God for all His blessings, including tilapia,
Steve

Surgery was Tuesday, about an 8-hour stretch from pre-op to finally in the room. Wednesday was the day I got out of bed and earned a yellow star for my bathroom activities. Today, Thursday, I earned a brown star. That’s right, after a two month break, Charmin sales will be increasing. This is the gateway to eating real food, getting the drip removed from my arm, and eventually going home.

I slept well last night, though not too long. Up at 5 and reading a library book when an associated surgeon stops by. He told me that I could shower, which I gladly did. Didn’t touch the wound, but did pat it dry. Clean feels good!

I started on my walking laps early, and am up to 7 so far today.

Then I had an old familiar feeling, and did my business. And called the nurse to come see my accomplishment. She was happy for me, and logged it in the system so the doctors can see it. She wasn’t as excited the second time, and told me to go ahead and flush in the future, unless it was something unusual or noteworthy. I thought, but didn’t say, that after nine weeks, *everything* is noteworthy.

And I asked and got permission to use underwear, and the nurse even said that I could wear pants as long as nothing binds the wound. Bettie is bringing me real clothes to wear.

I keep being real happy at how well I am doing, what great strides I am making. Then I remember God, who is the provider of every good and perfect gift, and who is the Great Physician, and I realize that I am just walking along a path that He has created for me.

Part of that path should include real food now – a couple doctors just came in to talk to me, and they plan to change my diet if the boss agrees.

I hope the boss agrees.

Next note and hopefully a food report on Friday.

Mending,
Steve

Folks, this is going out blind copy. Email me back if you want daily updates. Otherwise the next note will be that I have left the hospital, probably Sunday or Monday.

Surgery was yesterday, Tuesday the 17th. I was in recovery about two and a half hours, waiting while they got somebody out of the hospital and cleaned the room. It is a private room, so I didn’t mind too much.

My minister, Jeff Hill, was my first visitor in the room. Bettie had gone to find some food, and returned a bit later. I had a nasal gastric tube to drain my stomach, an oxygen tube, and a catheter so I didn’t have to get up to go to the bathroom. Surprisingly, the oxygen was the worst. I didn’t need the air supply, but some doctor had ordered it. And the monitor kept beeping loudly whenever the tube slipped out of my nose – about every 15 minutes, all night long. I almost did a dance when they took out all three tubes this morning. Almost. Instead, I took a victory nap.

I am up, sitting in a chair, wearing the traditional native costume while I am here on vacation. I have no refreshing beverage by my side – they aren’t letting me drink anything yet, much less eat. But I can catch up on my sleep…

And I want to offer thanks to God for His love and mercy and grace through all this. I don’t know His reasons for this detour from my life’s plans, though I have learned much patience and humility, and learned (once again) that I am not invincible. And those are good things.

I look forward to a full recovery, and would prefer sooner rather than later – and it’s all in God’s hands. Thank you all for your prayers and support.

And lunch just arrived – wasn’t expecting this! Beef broth, apple juice, decaf iced tea, plus orange and strawberry jellos. Almost as good as the Chinese buffet I had Monday.

Steve

And yes, I filled up last night, not trusting the low prices to last. I even got 30 cents off using my Kroger card, so the difference between what I paid last night and what they are charging now is 80 cents. That’s sticker shock.

In Matthew 26:11, He says

The poor you will always have with you

That automatically sets up divisiveness, a split between the “you” that He was talking to, and “the poor”, those people over there who are needy.

If we fall into financial ruin, lose a job or have a big setback, that moves us from the “you” group, the non-poor, over into the other group.  Strange for Jesus to set up a split like this.  Isn’t He the God of love?

Since you ask, yes, He is the God of love.  And Jesus is not setting up any “us vs. them” divisions. He is making a commentary about bell curves, if you will.  Any random grouping of anything will tend to shape itself into the common bell curve.  Sometimes you are on the low end, and get labeled “poor”, and sometimes you are in the middle or upper end, labeled “you”.  If this is a group of billionaires, there will still be a poorest billionaire stuck down in the “poor” category.  Is he/she poor?  Among that group, yes.  In reality, no.

Look at a different sample: people who receive microloans. The first microloan was for $27 – less than some of us pay for an entree.  The average microloan is $200.  The amount of money some people carry in their wallet, or drop on concert tickets.  And that’s life-changing for the recipients (the entrepreneurs, not TicketMaster). Even among these, where our monthly entertainment budget could mean the difference between life and death to them, there is a range from the poorest of the poor to the “wealthiest” of the poor.

And yet, this is not what Jesus was talking about.  It’s true – Jesus always spoke the truth – and yet there’s more to the statement.  Think for a moment about the widow who gave two mites in the offering.  The value of the mite was about six minutes’ worth of work.  Two of them came to twenty percent of an hour’s wages.  At ten bucks an hour, that is two bucks.  At the time, the face value was far less. For us, two bucks is nothing.  If it’s missing from our wallets, we may not even notice it.  Two bucks is the taxes on a store purchase.  It’s a couple cans of pop on a hot day.  It’s the pretzels and candy that get us through a long afternoon.  For her, though, Jesus says that it is “all that she had to live on“.

So this is dumb, really.  The old lady had a couple bucks and threw it all away, in the offering?

No.  This is smart, really. The widow (Luke says she is poor, not how old she is) has a couple bucks, and is giving it as a free-will offering to what she loves.  Matthew 6:19-21 says

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

So she was doing the wise thing. She was rich in heaven, which is eternal.

This forces the question: who then was poor?  It was the “rich” people, putting their big money into the offering.  Jesus called them out on it by praising the widow:

Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all of them

So the poor who we always have with us is true in the physical sense – some people have more money than others.  And it is true in the spiritual sense – had the church fallen down right then, the widow would have gone to Heaven.  The others?  The Bible doesn’t say explicitly, but it leads me to think that they would have missed the glory train.

To circle around: we can measure people in all sorts of ways, along multiple bell curves. Some won’t have much money.  Some won’t have much God in their lives.

Guess which one is more important. Guess who the needy people really are.

Dave Farquhar, a blogger, author (book and magazine), journalist, and superb technician, included this in his retrospective on ten years of blogging:

7. Sometimes you can’t wait 15 minutes, but if you can, giving yourself a little time and distance between typing that last period and hitting the publish button always results in better content.

He doesn’t use the word rewrite, but he is not advocating the pause to bask in the glory of your own written words.  There can be something that pops out at you, something that could be worded better, or left unsaid.  Once you change that thing, your piece is better.

And that betterness was missing in a recent newspaper article.

Cincinnati’s Drake Hospital was just sold by its owner, Hamilton County.  I am in favor of that action.  I don’t live in the county, but the idea of a political entity running hospitals (or health care) rubs me the wrong way.  Of course, they are selling it at a small fraction of its property value, which is another problem, but that’s not the point here.

The Enquirer published a story about the sale, before the county commissioners voted on it.  One commissioner had apparently flip-flopped in his position.  The paper wrote

Even earlier this month, when Monzel proposed selling Drake Hospital, Portune was against selling off the property.
What prompted his change of heart is unclear.

Nice and clear.  I didn’t have any questions about this.  Factual reporting.  But then comes the next paragraph:

Portune’s position on the sale is a change of heart from earlier this month, when Monzel first proposed selling the hospital.

It is apparently an earlier draft of the first paragraph.  A quick break, as Dave suggested, and a review of the story afterwards, would have prevented this embarrassing duplication.

Sorry, Enquirer.  Sorry, Sharon Coolidge.  But I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em.  This is what it looked like on-line:

Some say the measure of a man is in dollars, and others in friends.

Some say the measure of a man is in the length or quality of his life.

I say the measure of a man is in milliliters.

I had my surgery three weeks ago today, and it didn’t turn out exactly the way I had planned.  They took out the 14 inches of my large intestine, yes, but the doctor wanted to make sure that the big old thing would heal.  Can’t heal if it’s in use.  Gotta be in use if it’s connected.  If it’s disconnected, the eating output has to go somewhere, right?  So I ended up with a temporary ileostomy, where the end of my small intestine empties into a bag instead of into the large intestine.  I have a second surgery pending, that will put tab A into slot B and hook everything up pretty much the way it used to be.

I’m looking forward to that.

While I was in the hospital (4 1/2 days), my input was measured, and my output was carefully measured.  This is both liquids and solids, if you catch my drift.  The solids weren’t (and aren’t) very solid.  It ranges from a thick paste to a pretty thin liquid.  For the first week I was at home, I had to measure my “solid” output.  The doctor wanted to make sure I wasn’t dehydrating, since extracting liquids is the job of the large intestine, and he was off slacking.

I’m back working now, at home, and I’m getting my strength back.  It’s not all there yet, even after three weeks.  Yes, I think I should be Superman.  We have a treadmill at home, compliments of a neighbor who left it in the trash because they couldn’t use an Allen wrench to adjust the belt.  On Saturday, I jumped up on it and thought I’d go at my old walking speed of 4 miles an hour.  It didn’t toss me off the back of it, like in a cartoon, but it came close.  I settled for 2.5 MPH, and did an hour at that speed.  Very good exercise, but slower than I would have done before the surgery.

On the whole, I don’t like hospitals.  The one I was in did a great job of taking care of me.  I never felt neglected or in any way abused.  What I did feel was sleepless and tired.  They would wake me up in the middle of the night for getting blood pressure and temperature.  They were concerned about my blood sugar being too high, so they stuck me multiple times per day (night).  The head resident would stop by at 6 in the morning to see how I was doing (I’m asleep, Ryan), and the surgeon would stop by at 7.  I don’t think I got more than two or three hours of uninterrupted sleep while I was there.

There are times when I wish I was rich, and could afford to go to a boutique hospital.  One where they would coordinate their night-time visits to maximize my sleep.  One where they have real food instead of hospital food (although it wasn’t bad, at all, once I got to eat it).  The boutique hospital would only carry current issues of magazines, and would have more cable channels than I could browse through in a day.

I don’t think this boutique hospital exists, and I sure couldn’t afford it if it did.  But there’s one thing I know: they wouldn’t care about milliliters.  Well, they would, but they would shelter me from it.  Nice people in this fantasy hospital.  I like them.

This prayer is probably the second or third most popular of all English prayers. I would rank it below “Now I lay me down to sleep”, and don’t know how it compares to any common meal prayer. But this has the advantage of being Biblical – straight from the mouth of Jesus.

I have heard some people advocate against using red-letter editions of the Bible, based on their view that Jesus was just a man. I disagree. Jesus was fully man while He was on earth, and He was and is fully God. That’s somebody to pay attention to.

The prayer starts out “Our Father, who art in Heaven”. The prayer is addressed to God the Father. Jesus is telling us that our prayer, our talk with God, can reach from earth to Heaven. That is good. Having a disconnected God is not good or beneficial.

Is there a physical distance to Heaven? I don’t know. Descriptions of Hell sound like a real, physical place. If Hell exists, I have to think that Heaven also has a location. But I don’t think you can get in by flying there in your space ship and knocking on the front door.

So God the Father can be reached, says God the Son. But what about the other part of communication – the part from God to us? Good news. Jesus has that covered too. Later in the prayer Jesus says “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven”. “Thy” refers to God the Father, whose will is supreme in Heaven.

Jesus knew that He wouldn’t be on earth (physically) for very long. He was telling this to both His disciples and His followers -those of us who have identified with Jesus Christ. This was not only for the first century AD, it is for now. It is for today and tomorrow, until Christ returns.

Somehow, then, God’s will must be known by us humans down here on earth. But how? A good start is reading the Bible. It is God’s word, recorded and preserved across centuries. Prayer, including the Lord’s Prayer, is also good. Surround yourself with good, caring, Christian people, the kind you find at most churches. And share the Good News of Jesus whenever appropriate. Take care of widows and orphans.

You will find that Heaven, regardless of physical distance, is very close spirituality.