A great day!

Hello Dear Ones,
Sorry for the late update tonight.

Isy gave me a little scare this morning. I called the hospital to ask how her night was. They transfered the phone right to her which was a pleasant surprise. She said her night was "horrible!" I immediately braced myself. She must have had more coughing/bleeding. "What happened?" Honestly I was afraid to ask. "I slept awful." OH.... what a sigh of relief I felt inside! "I'm sorry you slept awful," I said, and tried to disguise the smile from ear to ear I felt in my heart!

Isy had a very good day today. She sat up in the chair at the bedside and was even eating some chicken by this evening's meal. She still is quite weak and couldn't wait to get back to bed after the first time she's been out of bed in 10 days! She tires out easily which is expected. We had to limit our visits to 10-15minutes at a time. She enjoyed seeing her brother John and Evelyn (from Goshen) and sister Hennie and Mark (from KS) for short visits today as well and we enjoyed visiting with them in the waiting room. I hope that tomorrow they will move Isy out of the ICU and to the regular Med-Surg unit. I would expect her to be in the hospital several more days yet, to work on getting her strength back, at least enough that she could get into the front door at home. : ) She (we, ok...all of us) have some anxiety about future bleeding but she made it 55 hours so far, we are especially thankful for that, beating out the old 40hour record. She's not ready to hear "all the details" yet of the past 9 days. She wants to only talk about positive things... where she is going, not where she has just come from. I don't blame her for that. Thank goodness she missed most of these past 9 days. She does have some very vivid and scary memories which we hope will fade but it makes me sad to hear her talk about them. We have had to get some teasing in though now that she is feeling better. We were talking about the medication they used for 9 days... Diprivan, which is the medicine that Michael Jackson used to try and sleep (why any doctor would try to use that for restorative sleep I don't know... that's another subject for another day) ANYWAY... we teased her that that medicine is the reason she woke up with a white glove on one hand. ; ) She laughed with us and that felt good.

I'm going to close this a little short tonight. We are going to work tomorrow. AJ and Bonnie are leaving for MN in the morning. Archie and Jade have regularly been checking in with us by phone every day from Kansas. It's been hard for Archie to be so far away. We told them not to come. We didn't want little Jade to see Beppe not feeling well and worry about her, especially since she just lost her mommy. Archie would have hopped in the truck as soon as we would have said "come" though. For. Sure. Our kids aren't too happy with us though. "You actually said 'don't come?' I can't believe it... why did you say that?!"

Please continue to pray that the bleeding vessels have forever been healed and for the anxiety of a recurrence of the problem to lessen. Again, thank you so much for your support. I received some lovely emails of encouragement today. While they made me a little teary eyed, they certainly were appreciated. Thank you.

Good-Night!