Update

We have been to the hospital every day this week -- the dietician because Nel has lost 10 kilos -- 22 pounds -- in the last few months and I have been given firm instructions to fatten her up like a foie gras goose for Friday, the anaesthesia guy, the surgery team, the post op doc, and so on. Tomorrow is the only day this week we are not going to the hospital this week.

So of course tomorrow is Daan's follow up with the pediatrician. Whose office is in the hospital.

I think we should just set up a camp bed and save commuting time.

So I have not written much. I actually came upstairs to write here several times today but people are coming to visit. This is a good thing and most welcome.

It's funny, everybody reacts to this news in a different way. We have had some folks downright insisting that Nel must be feeling badly, but she really is not. She has no symptoms now other than a terrible itch -- the itch is from the bile salts from her gall bladder being deposited in her skin because her gall bladder is partially blocked. After many frustrating phone calls I left Nel upstairs at the x ray, and walked into the surgeon's office. I then begged and pleaded and carried on at some length. It appears that the resistance we were meeting was simply that, because this process has gone so fast, her status had not yet been entered into the computer. So the office staff there did some actual sneaker-on-the ground footwork, with which I was much impressed. And they came up with something. I have no idea what it was, but Nel got to sleep a whole night for the first time in far too long so whatever it is we are glad to have it.

As I understand it, this is the problem with pancreatic cancer -- that you have no real symptoms until it's too late and it has spread through your whole body. Happily (?) well, yes, it's an odd kind of happiness but still, happily, Nel's gall bladder closed at some point which made her yellow. Otherwise she probably also would have found out after it was too late.

It has since opened again, at least partially, because she is much less yellow -- heck, she is no yellower than my mother and my sister, she looks rather as though she had bought a cheap ass tanning lotion -- and the rest of her symptoms have also disappeared. So it is a very good thig she went to the doctor when she did, because otherwise she would almost certainly have concluded that whatever-that-was, had healed itself.

In any event, it has been quite an eye opener in a lot of unexpected ways.

Nel is typically Nel, ever and always. Her primary worry point has been the boys -- both hers and mine. Otherwise, well, you know how people say death is a part of life? Here's a secret -- most of them don't actually believe that when it isn't a line on a greeting card but death is actually sitting in the room with you. I believe it, and I am not at all sure that I would continue to believe it in that case. But my mother in law actually does.

I did spend some time today shopping for nightgowns, as Our Nel plans to be attractively clad for the two weeks she has to stay in hospital. I offered her a nice bed jacket with fourteen layers of lace and ruffles and she said, well, there are things one really shouldn't put out in print. So she didn't want a bed jacket with ruffles and lace and so on.

I even helpfully pointed out that smocking adds, you know, layers to your front if strategically placed. She responded with something even more unprintable. Some people, you know, you just can't help them.

So instead I got her a shocking pink Warhol print nightgown and a green one with a mandala and a lucky elephant and an orange one which was part of an in joke which wasn't even funny -- though if repeated often enough it might become funny, you know how in jokes are.