Birthday!

It's my 30th birthday! I could never have anticipated spending it like this, recovering in a hospital cot from a sword injury. I'm not bitter about it, though. Most of my birthdays are pretty low-key affairs - I'm happy to go out for drinks or dinner with a few friends, because on my birthday, that's what I'm grateful for - having friends. I can buy my own presents :) Since my hospitalization, I've received a staggering amount of messages from family, friends, well-wishes, and church members, some of whom only know me via prayer requests. To anyone who's reading this and has sent me an email lately: Thank you. My birthday is going great, solely on account of the concern and attention I've received over the past few weeks.

Today started with some special events. For the first time in three weeks, I showered! That's not to say I haven't been bathing - you can do a lot with some non-rinse soap and a few hand towels - but there's nothing like standing in a shower under a hot spray for 30 minutes after weeks of patchwork cleaning. The sutures are sufficiently healed, so I can get them wet - only the PICC line site has to be kept totally dry.

Not only did I get to shower, I got to wash my hair. Laugh if you want, but my hair was in a bad way. If you'd reached out and scritched my head with your eyes closed, you might think you were petting a terrier. My hair was akimbo, flung in all directions. With a little (ok, a lot) of soap, I managed to get my hair clean, and then dried and brushed back. To complete my mission of normalcy, I tried shaving, especially around the sutures. This task was much easier to perform with the stomach pump out.

After about 30 minutes of work, here I am:


The rest of the afternoon will be spent answering emails and thinking about how to organize my return to 9-5 life. I'll update this blog later after Page comes by and I open presents.