Facebook updates for Tuesday Dec. 21st

Tuesday was a wonderfully quiet day for John and for us. So much so that I was able to come home and rejoin my congregations in preparation for Christmas services this weekend.

7am The night nurse gave John a bath and this morning he is beautifully pink and brown and smells good and his curls are all clean and in place. I love it when they have time for these things.

11am Rounds have come and gone, they are cautiously optimistic. While it looks like the bleeding is handled there have been so many issues that everyone is just a bit gun-shy and waiting to see if something else happens. We continue to depend on his safety net most and try nit to get too caught up in monitors and numbers yet that is hard to do. For the moment it is a good moment and in that we rejoice.

3pm For the first time in days John's hemoglobin number went up and no blood products needed to do it. Pastor Porath came with the Lord's Supper and for this time things feel stable and quiet, Mark is headed back home in a few hours. Around us it is chaos, 3 rooms on this floor look like the days that John is in major crisis, running nurses, hovering docs and nurse practitioners, crying fear filled families, we pray Lord have mercy for each of them and only wish that there were more that we could do.

6pm The nurse practitioner stopped by on her way out to thank John for being her nice stable patient today :)

10pm Before heading off to sleep I got to visit with the physicians assistant who has been caring for John for several years including all of this course. She is so excited about how he is doing, his liver numbers are amazing, his kidneys number...s show that it is all reversible damage and his intestines look great. She explained more about the coil, it is metal and it is designed so that it will completely clot off the vessel within four days, build irreversible scar tissue in a few weeks and actually become the permanent end of that little vessel within a few months. When I left after prayers John looked beautiful pink and brown, with great blood pressure and pulse rate and most of all he just looked peacefully asleep.

We pray for more and more of these days to come and wish all a merry Christmas.