Welcome, welcome Sabbath morning

Welcome, welcome Sabbath morning...

That is the first line in one of our church's hymns.

Steve made it through the night just great. His ileostomy is functioning perfectly. This means that his body is finally being able to get rid of all the air that was in his abdominal region from the surgery and he no longer feels like a balloon that is ready to pop. Instead his ostomy bag keeps having to be burped, because of the air that is being released. It makes some rather cute and funny sounding gurgling noises when it does it. (I'm not so sure that Steve agrees with my opinion on that point, since it is hard to miss when it happens.) The other piece of good news is that because his ostomy is working correctly he is allowed to start eating some real food. The kitchen sent up what I thought was a rather impressive first breakfast of creamy wheat cereal, two pieces of toast, jello, saltine crackers, herb tea, and apple juice. He managed to get a few bites in before we headed down the hall to church.

Yep, you read right. We got to go to a half hour church service just down at the end of our hall. It is nice that they have a small simple meditation room on our floor of the hospital. They offer a brief Sunday service for the patients and any family members who would like to attend. Steve woke up and decided that he wanted to get cleaned up and try to make it to church. So that is what we did. We gave him his first bath since surgery, using wash clothes, and got him into some fresh hospital clothes. He then walked his way down and set himself up with his shadow (a contraption on wheels that carry's his oxygen tank, drip lines, meds, etc.) at the back of the room. I was able to help out and play the music for the service. We then returned back to our room where he was able to finish eating the breakfast he had started. So far the food seems to be staying down just fine. He has eaten it slowly which probably is helping. He is making great progress, we have a lot to be thankful for.