The eagle has landed

Mom finally had not one but two successful splashdowns today, and she's celebrated with the sounds of horns and kazoos and trumpet fanfare. If you know what I mean. Which means she was finally free to leave the hospital. She decided to wait to make sure her oral meds were strong enough to manage her pain, and I got to watch them remove her staples and we had to sit through Blinky the humorless nurse walking her through her discharge papers and we finally checked out at 7:00 pm after six days in the hospital.

But not before I took some more pictures of the hospital art.

Like this one, half of a matching set of two that look like they were designed on a Spirograph and framed by a casino owner. If you look closely, you can see the reflection of my dad and mom, still stylin' in her hospital garb, on what was to be her last lap around the walking track:
Or this picture, which celebrates nursing not with flowers and poems and bunting but with poorly drawn images of creepy old people cowering under a floating angel of death that by pure coincidence looks like me holding up my new camera phone:
To welcome Mom back into the real world, I've already made a trip to JCPenney to buy cheap towels and pillows she can bleed on, a respecable-looking robe she can wear to welcome visiting dignitaries, and some large cotton granny panties that won't chafe against her six-inch scar. And it was all on sale!

And now comes the end of the relaxing part -- which is the part where the nurses did all the hard work. But Mom's safe at home and able to move around with some degree of autonomy and there are familiar things around her and bathrooms she can get to and friends who will visit her and family members who will dote on her and a cat who will ignore her and she should convalesce quite comfortably.

In the mean time, I'm experiencing something I hadn't anticipated: an entire week of long-forgotten familiarities from my home town. Usually when I'm here it's over the holidays or a weekend and we go out and DO things. But on this trip I'm seeing the weeknight local news anchors I hadn't though about in seven years ... I'm catching up with family friends I don't usually run into ... I'm running mundane errands to the grocery stores and the malls I haven't been in since I don't know when. It's kind of comforting. And weird.

But then there's always something to bring me back to the excitement of the here and the now. Like Mom's occasional yelps of pain as she sits up. Or the sweet, kind, thoughtful notes from so many of you. Or the fact that I JUST BOUGHT MY FIRST GRANNY PANTIES.