After six very exhausted days, where Dad simply slept all the time and didn't have any energy to speak to us when we visited, he finally looked just a little brighter yesterday and was able to talk to us in the afternoon. He was sleeping again by the evening, and it's obvious that his body still needs a lot of rest. He can't really move his arms and legs yet, and he says that all his limbs feel as if they're laden down with lead.
I spoke this week with the surgeon who did the original operation, and asked him how things are going with the various infections (wound, lungs and abdomen) that Dad has been battling over the past weeks. He said that the wound is doing okay on the whole: because they couldn't sew it up after the third surgery, they're waiting for it to heal from the inside out, and that's going to take a long time. As for the underlying infection in Dad's abdominal cavity, infected pus is still draining from it, but blood tests for infection indicators seem to suggest that Dad is doing just a tiny bit better from day to day. The sore lungs and cough are still a trial for him, but hopefully will also continue to improve as Dad gets a little bit stronger. He's not really eating yet, and so his nutrition is coming mainly through a feed line through his nose to his stomach. He's lost quite a bit of weight.
As for me, I can hardly believe that I've been here in Scotland for nearly a month. It will be four weeks this weekend, and some of those weeks were rather traumatic ones. I'm so thankful to see Dad making some small steps of improvement now but, with things not yet being very stable, I haven't yet made any plans to return to Spain. I spend my afternoons and evenings at the hospital, and I spend my mornings and later evenings answering phone calls and catching up on computer work for ministry. The leadership training course that I should have been working with in Malaga is drawing to a close this weekend; I've been helping out (over the internet) this week with filling in the paperwork for the University and with the grading of the students' assignments that were written in French. As the strategic leadership school comes to an end, our KKI leadership team meetings and the biannual leaders' conference will begin in Torremolinos this weekend. After working all year to liaise with the hotel and communicate with the conference participants, it seems very strange for me not to be there to host the fifty or so people arriving for a leadership summit in "my" part of Spain. This morning I'm working to complete the last of the admin and paperwork that I'll need to pass on to the others who'll be leading the conference in my absence.
