Finally a night's sleep.

One of the big roadblocks to my recovery has been my inability to sleep at night, since I had to wake up every hour to change my diaper and if I happened to sleep for two hours, I would wake up in a wet bed.

We knew the solution would be an external catheter which is essentially a condom like device which collects urine and drains it into a bag. The problem was finding a device that was the right size. Every place we looked was getting out of the external catheter business and the devices left in their dwindling inventory were either too small or too large.

Yesterday Nathanael and I went to a place called IHC Home Medical where they had a disposable piece of paper with half circles on the outside that made it possible to determine the exact size of the device I would need... and as usual they had no devices in that size. But there were some, slightly larger, that I tried, and tonight I successfully wore it through the night allowing me to sleep from 10:15 to 4:00. This is not enough, of course, but it is more sleep in one night than I have had since I had the surgery, and I will take it.

This morning I will see my family doctor, James Rees, and have him do some blood work and perhaps a EKG to make sure things are proceeding normally. My appetite is still not normal, and the amount of food I am eating very small, but I hope that will change if I can get my electrolytes balanced.

For the record, all of this has been very hard. But I have the support of my family, the ability to get connected to my job in small ways online, and I hope I will eventually begin to make steady progress, something which depends to a large degree on getting a normal nights sleep.