Home. Got home Friday. Now it's Sunday. I am so tired all the time. I have asked Abi to translate this from tape because I still want to express myself and yet I am too tired to do it myself. I have a lot to say about the last week, but I am overwhelmed by what is now. I want so much to be better now. My um, everyone around me says my recovery is going miraculously. I'm healing very quickly. I'm up and walking around. I'm eating OK. I'm getting off some of the medicines. and Yet, large parts of the day I need to stay in bed. Learning about dependence > I am learning that there are sometimes when I need to be dependent on the people around me.... and I need to be okay with that. Mostly because I can't do for myself and that's frustrating because sometimes I can do for myself and then there are sometimes like now where I'm just too tired where I just need to lay here and just go to sleep. Abi asked me today. What's so bad about being dependent? And I have two answers. One is that it means that I am not strong. The second is it means that I might not get what I need. In this recuperation, I am needing to be dependent. I need to accept that dependence. ======= When I came home on Friday, many people from YSI had made posters welcoming me home, I went through the house very emotional looking at each sign and figuring out who had signed it and what they had said. Just made it to the living room and just sat down and was just completely overwhelmed by the love and the joy and compassion and support the people from YSI had given me and are given me. My dad who had driven me home was also awestruck. We just sat in the living room and basted in amazement at the whole thing. I am still a little amazed that I came back in three days. When people call they are amazed that even 5 days later that I am at home and not still in the hospital. It is really nice to be home. The hospital was OK but it was also very frustrating. I have a long list of things that frustrated me about it. I won't bore you. In the hospital though it really sunk in that I had obrain surgeryoe.. I had brain surgery because I had cancer. Those concepts even after the event were still and are still hard to accept and say. Though we don't have the final final report, all of the reports so far are very good. Susan Bell the nurse practitioner we worked with said the most helpful thing to Abi when she said I probably would not die of a brain tumor. Now we wait three months and get a scan and see if anything's there and six months later get another scan and just watch it and see what happens. I could be cured. It could come back. It could come back as a worse thing. Right now there is nothing to do but recover and wait and see what happens. ========= On the lighter side, we have been trying to name my head. So far the most popular one first discovered by my father said my scar looks like a baseball, with the stitches and the turns. Other things we've come up with are a Buddhist monk, a hari krishna person, of course Joanne's.. a skin head. It turns out the picture I made of myself didn't look a lot like what I finally turned out to look like and my hair's growing out so fast you'll probably never see me like that. =========== So finally, thank you again for reading and caring and for following my story as you have. One of the things I have learned is that not only do I have something to communicate, but some people are actually interested in hearing about it. So thank you for participating and I'll write to you or some one will write to you next time. Talk to you then. Bye bye, Dan. Dan's message, transcribed by Abi |