Thursday March 15, 2007 9:23 PM

I called Jim early this morning to check on him. His voice sounds a little stronger than yesterday, and each day that goes by he's coughing up less and less crap. But I heard an interesting story from his nurse tonight. They give him some Ambien at night to help him sleep because there's some crazy screamers in this ward. But at around 3 or 4 a.m. his nurse sees him sitting on the edge of his bed using his morphine pump, and he asks her, "Am I still at Lahey?" Then this morning when I called him he tells me, "There's a bunch of Miele people here to see me." I'm thinking, that couldn't be. If anyone from Miele decided to come up I know they'd call me first, but then Jim tells me, "Yeah- I just saw Lauren Tate in the hallway with the nurse." Are you sure, I ask him. But he was so insistent. I called Werner and asked him if by any chance he heard anything about Lauren coming up here, and he said no. I figured out what it was, though. His night nurse looks a lot like Lauren Tate. He must have seen her in the hallway. The nurse told me it's the morphine that makes you loopy like that. But by tonight they had him completely weaned off that stuff. His hearing seems to be improving, too.

So every day he gets a little better and a little better. He was up tonight looking at his new scars in the mirror. His face looks completely normal except for a slight swelling where he still has staples. He accidentally pulled three of the staples out scratching because he thought they were dried blood, but nothing spurted out of him so I guess that's o.k. I saw the infectious disease guy today and he said they're going to draw some more labs on him in the morning because they haven't done that in awhile. I can never remember the infectious disease guy's name so I just call him Bill Nye the Science Guy. But everyone likes the look of Jim so far.

Jim asked for his laptop again so since they're predicting 10 inches of snow here tomorrow and I don't know for sure I'll be able to get to the hospital I went ahead and brought it to him. I hid it in his closet so it doesn't look so obvious that it's there, and Jim is pretty mobile now so he can go get it himself.

And you know I've been here way too long when I know how to program the medication pumps myself. The pump for Jim's feeding tube kept ringing alarms like it was blocked. So I've already got the knack for trying to turn it to "Hold" and then "Feed", back and forth, to see if the alarm clears. Then two nurses and I were trying to figure it out. Maybe this batch of chocolate goop is extra thick? Maybe it's the tubing? Did you prime the pump first? Maybe we should try adding some water to it? They decided to get a new pump. This will be Jim's third pump. Every day they have to bring a new one because they aren't acting right. Well, what do you want...they're made by G.E. Ha ha ha. The longest they've gotten one to work has been 12 hours. In the meantime I took the volume of the feed down to see if that would help...I figured hell, the thing's acting loopy...I can't make it any worse. And if that doesn't work I know how to reprogram it. But a new one was on it's way when I left tonight.

I also keep encouraging Jim to use his little breathing contraption they left for him. It's kind of like a peak flow meter for people with asthma, and if you've every had surgery they probably gave you one. It's supposed to help you get the secretions out of your lungs. I had a year of vocal chord therapy when my voice went bad, though, so I know another function of those things is to excercise your larynx. It's kind of like stretching your muscles before you run. As you use the thing you can feel your vocal chords stretch out and then relax so it really helps you regain strength in that area.

I extended my hotel stay one more week. If everything keeps going like it's going I think there's a good chance he might get out of here by then. We won't know for sure until he passes a swallowing test, which they probably won't give him until Monday. They wanted him to heal a little more before they tried again.