Pod 6A, Room 17

Here are two pictures that I hope will help folks visualize where their love and prayers are headed. With notes.

1 - Susannah McCandless, our plucky heroine.

2 - Punk-rock haircut, courtesy of Ethan. The penultimate in a series of progressively shorter haircuts.

3 - Pumps hooked to two Hickman catheters that run directly into her heart. (The catheters also let the doctors draw blood without sticking her over and over again.) As far as I can tell, about 90% of contemporary inpatient medicine involves a bag full of liquid getting pumped into your blood.

4 - Wall of gizmos, most of them pretty standard. Oxygen, air, vacuum, vital signs monitor, nose and throat gadgets.

5 - The wall itself, however, is part of the air circulation system that keeps the room at positive pressure, isolating everything on this side of...

6 - ...this sliding glass door. Susannah can't leave without putting on a mask and gloves; no one else comes in without putting on a mask and gloves, which they then have to remove when they leave. So there is a lot of rapid glove-changing when we go out, for instance, to...

7 - ...our refrigerator.

8 - The window faces the maternity ward. At night you can see people wrangling babies, and our nurse says you can sometime watch births, if they haven't pulled the shades, though this seems a little hard to believe. Off to the left in this picture is the children's hospital.

9 - The spacious accomodations for family members. The little green tag on the chair shows that it's been sterilized, but this system is complicated, and I'll write more about it later.

10 - Last but not least, a schedule of people who are praying for Susannah at various times of the day. It's very wonderful, and the only time I've ever seen Excel and calligraphy go together.