Between the fall and the surgery and the meds and lying in bed for six days while eating so little, somehow Tanja has gotten tired. She is totally off the “pressors”, and her BP is trying to find solid ground—that’s not medically standard terminology—so when the PT showed up today with this cool walking assist device, Tanja, on standing to use it, broke out in a sweat and turned distinctly green.

“ I have to push through this,” she said.

“You can’t push through a drop in blood pressure,” said the PT, laughing warmly.

Tanja managed some steps but it was clear she wasn’t going to be doing much more.

She was very discouraged by this and spent some time with furrowed brow before kind is assimilating it into her world view not as a failure but as a step forward. When you are climbing mountains there are ups and downs, and both are crucial, since you absolutely cannot have one without the other.

So she has spent the afternoon focusing on what she can do: eating. Her appetite has be vanishingly small but she feels like calories are related to energy, so she’s digging into a very tasty tofu curry and a protein shake, with sautéed spinach coming up in the next delivery.

Today Tanja has gotten her orders to leave the ICU and just needs a bed to open up in the step-down ward before she can leave. She’s nervous about going just because the people here have all been so kind and capable and caring—these three things in practice look and feel very much like love. And Tanja is a finely tuned two-way device uniquely sensitive to such things.

So respect and gratitude and admiration and thanks and, of course, love to the many, many professionals of Trauma ICU 8C.