Chest Tube is out

Chest Tube is out, actually more like side tube. The hospital folks remove the chest tube early this evening about 7pm Thursday 6/28/07.

This means also the nurse are getting Heidi ready for discharge by decelerating the pain management via the epidural. Just like one of those long jet plane ride, the pilot slowly lowers the plane from high altitude to lower altitude so the passenger can get use to the pressure [ear]. In Heidi's case however, the nurse are slowy lowering the doses of pain medication from 14 cc (thats metric folks) down to zero (i guess) by 0.5 cc every hour. I forgot to ask the nurse what the unit time for 14 cc (per minute or per hour).

What i dont understand is that every time the nurse lowers down the medicine, Heidi uses her clicker to get more intake of the pain killer - she basically overrides the automatic fluid flow.

For a while early this evening, she had this bad hiccup and she couldn't talk becuase it hurts her so much.

I went for a walk with Heidi around the hall corridor. She even lapp some other fellow, and he had a helper carrying his oxygen; while Heidi had hers on wheels. At one point Heidi got mad at me for slowing her down because i keep on stopping reading the factoid on the walls. One factoid say: the blood vessel is 60,000 miles long enough to go arround the equator two times. Another say the blood circulate around the body in 20 seconds. Now i wonder if that means the blood circulates 60,000 miles within 20 seconds.

I heard that people around the world come to UCSF for treatment, and this must be true because when Heidi and I were going to her pre-surgery appointment they kept on asking us if our hotel is nearby. And Heidi would politely say something like "Oh no we leave accross the bridge, and didn't have take a plane or something, we just have to ride the traffic."

So with that in mind, I expected Heidi's roomate to be someone from a very far place. Nope. Her roomate lives on on West Avenue which is a few blocks from our home in Hayward, California.

I ask if the result of the biopsy was available, they said it will probably be ready by early next week.

Heidi told me that since the chest tube is out, visitors are now welcome.

Thank for your continued prayers. Please keep on praying for Heidi. Some say that Heidi's surgery is sometimes more painful than an open hearth surgery. Thats probably becuase Heidi's was "open surgery".

Folks, that's all for tonigh'ts report,
Lawrence