It’s Sunday the 29th. I’ve been in a hospital for 18 days. On Thursday of last week I was in surgery to remove the obstruction, which involved opening up about 60% of the incision from my cancer surgery and digging around in my abdomen. They eventually took out between 3″ and 4″ of my colon and sewed things back up, so I’m nursing a new(old) scar on my stomach.

As of today I’m on unrestricted clear liquids, which means exciting things like Jell-o, broth, and italian ice. My bowels have been voiding themselves with precision timing every two hours. Have I mentioned I’m still hooked up to two IVs? One is saline, the other is TPN going in through my port, which is supposed to be a full suite of nutrition but which makes my ass burn every time I use the bathroom. Eating this food isn’t a problem, but I am having random stabbing pain in my gut that doesn’t seem to be connected to anything. I’m hooked up to an on-demand IV drip of hydromorphone but I haven’t used it since yesterday.

Hospital life is the most boring hell I think I could imagine. I’ve got about 50 channels of DirectTV, maybe 5 of which are actually worth watching. I’ve got my laptop but I’m bored with the internet. I’m tired of streaming movies or watching crap TV shows. I can’t walk around much because the ward here is small, and I’m cold most of the time. So I sit in bed and stare listlessly at the TV or my phone or the laptop and hope there’s something interesting happening outside.

They say I’ll go to full liquids tomorrow, which include stuff like cream of tomato and cream of potato soup (the stuff that made me cry with happiness back in December) and pudding and coffee with cream and other good shit like that. So there’s that to look forward to. One of the docs said they might cut me loose on Tuesday if things keep progressing. At this point I’d be  happy to get all of the IVs pulled as soon as possible so I can sleep better.