State of the Marek

[pne]

We drove Stella to the hospital around half past one or so in the afternoon.

The first nurse Stella talked to said she didn't know much since she had just started her shift, but she thought she had heard that Marek was off the supplemental oxygen now, which would be good.

We went into his room, where he was sleeping, but he woke up soon. Another nurse came into the room, introduced herself, and said that she had switched off the oxygen at around eleven o'clock. She also said that he had needed a fair bit of attention at night but that he had been quite the angel that morning. I noted that the oxygen meter (he had a device reading his blood oxygen saturation as well as his heartbeat) read about 96% ("good" is 95–100%) and the nurse said that when he was sleeping, he was even often at 100%.

We took him out of his hospital cot, and Stella said she thought he recognised me and seemed happy to see me. Amy showed him the doll she got for Christmas. I tried to get her to tell him in English, but she wouldn't.

(Stella had said earlier that perhaps Amy could speak English to him, to help him learn. And perhaps it would give Amy another person to talk to in English.)

I told Amy that it had seemed odd to me at first to speak English to her, too, when she was just born, because she couldn't respond either way, but that it soon became normal for me, and perhaps it would for her, too.

Anyway. We showed him his presents (a soft kind of ball for gripping which rattles when you shake it, and a mobile), but he didn't seem particularly interested. We put the new mobile up over his bed, anyway.

Soon, the doctor came in and examined him. She agreed that he was doing much better.

Stella asked him when we could count on taking him back home, and the doctor said that if he keeps up that pace, he could probably be discharged in two days or so, which would be Sunday. She also said that with many children, they have a kind of threshold, and once they cross it, they get better fairly quickly.

So the way it's looking now, Stella won't be going to church on Sunday but will be spending time with him to help him recover; then we'll probably pick both of them up in the car, and we'll all be going to the family Christmas celebration on Monday. So that's good!

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After Amy and I left the hospital, we went for a walk in Meyers Park, basically "right next door", at Stella's suggestion. She also said there was a little pony... thingy ("farm" sounds wrong) where you could ride ponies for a small fee.

We saw two girls in riding boots ahead of us and figured they might know where it was, and it was just up the path a bit. And theoretically they were closed on Christmas Day, but they were doing a few rides anyway, subject to the number of volunteers present. So Amy got to ride once around the place on a pony, and was happy as could be about that. Afterwards, we looked at the horses and ponies stabled there.

Then we ate dinner at KFC, and finally came back home.

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Unrelatedly, when I connected my satnav to the PC with the USB cable and visited the "My Garmin" Dashboard, it said there was a new firmware revision available. I told it to update, but at about 40%, the Internet connection apparently cut out—at any rate, the progress bar stalled at that position, and shortly afterwards, I got an AIM system message telling me I was signed in at two locations, which typically happens when the Internet connection drops and gets reestablished, especially when it's due to the router rebooting itself.

Now I hope the device isn't completely broken; when I clicked "Cancel", it warned that this may leave my device inoperable. It did act a bit strange after I disconnected and reconnected the USB cable (the display lit up and the battery level meter went away, which makes sense since it was charging and connected to an external power source, but normally it switches to external storage mode when you connect a USB cable and you can't interact with it any more), but eventually switched to storage mode. So... acting slightly weird, but I hope it's still basically OK. *knocks on wood.*