Tris is Home

Tris about 5 hours after surgery.

What is normal? The Oxford Canadian Dictionary say it's "1. regular, typical, usual. 2. physically or mentally sound. 3. average." Great definition of what was NOT my day. It wasn't full of adventure, but it was full of new experiences. I woke up in a Singapore hotel, alone in my room, an experience I have never had in my 39 years. I, a grown woman of 39 years, had never stayed completely alone in a hotel and then eaten breakfast on my own. What did I learn? I learned that I don't mind the sleeping part, but it's not fun searching for a good breakfast in a foreign country, to be eaten alone. At least they spoke English in Singapore.

After breakfast I went to pick up Tris from the hospital. It took a while to be discharged (a peak at the bill...$16 000 Singapore dollars for the medical bill...better suck up the whining about insurance not covering our travel/accommodation costs) but we were speeding down a spotless Singapore highway by 8:30 am. After one attempt to drop us off at the wrong terminal, our taxi driver got us to the correct one ($25 Singapore later versus the approximately $4 it would have cost us to take the subway if all had been normal).

A little bit of comedy always occurs during travels, and ours was that our airline ticket counter agent took quite a long time to book us the 'perfect' seat for Tris so that he wouldn't have his arm/shoulder banged. We ended up in the very back row, no complaint on our part, with an empty seat between us as a buffer. The funny bit? Of the potential 186 seats in our plane, probably 40 were taken up, and all at the front. Life is always good for a chuckle.



Tris in the terminal...looks much nicer with a colourful shirt on and no tubes sticking out of him. Funny that.

The plane ride itself was mostly uneventful, except for two rather bumpy sessions of turbulence. Maybe it was just a practice session of the later earthquake we were to experience once we got home. I was reading on the couch and I saw Candace's foot touching same couch. When the sofa started jiggling of course the first thought to pop into my head was "she can sure move the couch with her foot!" Then I realized her leg wasn't moving. We conferenced and decided we'd best get into a safe position (which here is probably outside rather than in a cement house). It probably lasted just over a minute, long enough to discuss and analyze, and then it was gone. I've seen on FB that it was a 7.4 but I don't know where the epicenter was. No worries though. Most of you who are reading this live on a similar kind of fault line, so don't fret about us way over here.

We spent the rest of our afternoon just hanging. Wednesdays the kids get out early and so we read and played some games. Not a typical Wednesday but we wanted to keep it low key for Tris for at least a day. He's doing well and any pain he's experiencing is a "hopeful, healing" pain rather than the dull, hopeless ache he's experienced for the last 7 weeks. That's good news!

Thanks for reading.