Recovering

J finally made it home from the hospital Monday night!  Hallelujah!  What a long stretch.  He's feeling so much better already though.  He's not in pain, this is his last day of antibiotics, and his incisions are healing well.  He even made it to church today-- he mostly slept through Sacrament meeting, but there was nothing earth-shattering about that!

On this end of things I am just so grateful.  Grateful for modern medicine, for one.  In the not-too-distant past a ruptured appendix would have been a death sentence.  Hard as the last few weeks have been, my son is alive and well.  I'm grateful for kind, efficient, and caring doctors, nurses, assistants, custodial, and even food service people who took such good care of us in the hospital.  I'm beyond thankful for my other kids-- especially M & B, who went above and beyond to try and keep life running at home as much as they could.  My parents came down as much as they could to help, whether it was staying in the hospital with J (so Terence and I could go run in the trail race) or staying way too late with the kids at home and doing piles of dishes.  Kristi and my sisters were always just a message away, helping me keep my sanity when I was so scared and worried.  And there were countless friends from church who stepped in with offers of help.

Best of all was a group of teenage boys that came to visit J in the hospital and brought an XBOX to play.  That was the first time in ten days I saw him smile.

Now we are just trying to get back into the swing of things.  There are a lot of things around the house I'm trying to catch up on.  School stuff that fell through the cracks, bills that needed to be paid, yard work that has to be done (the weeds are morphing our desert landscaping into jungle wildness) and such.  J still has follow up doctor appointments also.  Luckily he is not behind in school-- one of the greatest blessings is that J is doing online high school, and they just pushed his semester start date back.  He started this week, but he can take breaks to rest whenever he needs them.  If he'd been in regular high school, he would now be so behind in his classes he would probably wear himself out trying to catch back up.

This morning I woke up next to Terence, and he just sighed and pulled me close and told me how wonderful it is to get to sleep next to each other again.  We both sleep better-- more deeply and more comfortably-- when the other one is there.  I feel like J is finally recovering, but he's not the only one.  Our whole family is on the mend.

Prayers truly work miracles.  Thank you!