weight a minute - this just in.

On one of her checking-in calls last week Abby said "Is Mike losing weight in the hospital?" My reply was "Well, maybe a little... you would think so but I'm not sure." When you visit Dr. Haughey's office the first thing you do is weigh in. He weighed in two weeks ago on our pre-op visit and he weighed in yesterday. So we got the weight loss figures. I have to say that we were both surprised that he has lost 16 pounds! He started at 187 and weighed 171 yesterday. I told Mike that his full time job, and my full time job, for the next two weeks is nutrition & caloric food intake. When they told us that Mike would have to learn to swallow again before we could get out of the hospital we thought "yeah, yeah, learn to swallow again... how big a deal could it be?" It's a big deal. Unless you can see how hard he works and how hard he concentrates mentally and physically to get a half cup of yogurt or broth or ice cream down, you can't understand it. (In fact, probably only lifelong friend Gary Oliver and brother-in-law Curt Ray "get it".) With my interest in nutrition and cooking, it is an exciting challenge to find protein-rich foods that interest him and more importantly, have the right texture. Last night he had Tom's cream of cauliflower soup and tonight Tom is whipping up cream of avocado soup. This morning we were excited that he successfully consumed some soy yogurt and two scrambled eggs that were softly cooked with butter and 1/2 & 1/2 then mashed with more butter. Bingo. He can get hot tea down if it has the soothing properties of honey added to it, otherwise it gets coughed back out. These post-surgery conditions will subside in about 2 weeks. If I talk to Mike while he is eating, he says "not now I'm working". I am super proud of his Marathon efforts!