From his bedside in ICU (intensive care)

I'm sitting in a chair beside the cowboy bed and typing this with blue sterile gloves on and a yellow sterile gown.

We're in intensive care. Bill's room is dark and cool and quiet and filled with machines and wires.

He was awake for a little while when I came in, but is asleep again. The nice nurse, Jeff, brought me a chair so I can stay with him all day and until 10 pm tonight. I wouldn't be anywhere else on the planet but right here with my boy.

He has so many wires coming out of him that he looks like a big plate of angelhair spaghetti.

Uh oh. Something just started beeping really loudly. The nurse just ran in.

Okay, it's okay now. It had something to do with the many bags of stuff that are dripping into his arm.

A while ago, a big buzzer went off, and the machine said CANT FIND PULSE! CANT FIND PULSE! And his heartbeat line went flat. Lord have mercy, I'm going to turn gray overnight from all this drama. It turned out to be just a glitch in the machine for a minute.

So here's how our cowboy looks. They took him off the respirator and he has oxygen going into his nose. He has a multi-wire drain going into the side of his chin and it has blood and water coming out of it. No idea what that could be.

Oh yeah, if you are queasy you might want to stand way back from your screen as you read this so it doesn't create good imagery for you. My daughter turned GREEN when she saw him and had to go sit down in the hall and almost passed out. No kidding. She was sweating and lost all her color.

Continuing then: He has a lot of electrodes on his chest with wires. Those appear to go to the big screen behind his head which has six rows of patterns on it in bright green, red, and blue. Those appear to show his heart beat strength (Im guessing), blood pressure,heart rate, and breathing pattern.

He has a morphine button for pain. And he says it hurts his abdomen to breathe.

But the worst is how his abdomen looks: There is a huge slice from his navel all the way down; that is bleeding and covered with white tape. He has his new stoma on his right side, which is similarly--well, I won't keep talking about the blood everywhere but you can fill in the missing information as you wish concerning that. Then he has tubes coming out of his right side of his abdomen, draining it. Then he has a catheter in.

Those are the visuals.

What did he talk about? He only asked about one thing. He wanted to hear about the people who were reading this. Isn't that funny? That's all he wanted me to tell him about, was the people that were thinking of him. He lay there with his eyes closed, smiling, as I told him about each person or call or email or blog follower.

After that, he fell asleep.

They said he might get to try to sit up today.

I will write more later, but now I hope you feel like you are here in the ICU with us. Because you ARE. That's how love is; you're here.