Since arriving in hospital, Tanja has had a recurring dream in which she is wearing a very specific outfit which she described this morning.

“It’s rust brown corduroys, fine wale, cut like jeans. I’m wearing brown leather boots, like hiking boots, a brown long sleeve t-shirt in light, light cotton, a knit jumper over it, almost like a tube top with two inch straps at the shoulders, the color of the flesh of butternut squash.”

In his dream she is taking steps two at a time and is just her normal physical self. The color palette of her outfit makes her think it must be fall. Maybe this coming fall:)

The neuro guy came in this morning—that very focused, very capable man with the (no-doubt professionally necessary) ability to remove any scrap of unearned hope from his conversation. He ran Tanja through a series of motion tests that are measured, apparently, on a set numerical scale.

“These are fours,” he said, with a hint of surprise bordering annoyance. “You’re doing fours. They didn’t tell me you were doing fours.”

“Is that encouraging?” Tanja asked.

“What?” he said. “Oh yeah, big time.”

Tanja felt it was a victory to have forced this sphinx into saying something upbeat.

All the lying about, if that’s what Tanja has been doing, has led to dvts in her calves— little blood clots which are only a problem if they break loose and hit your lungs or, less frequently, your brain. Normally the treatment is blood thinners. Tanja can’t have blood thinners because they could compromise her recovery from surgery so her deep vein thrombosis will be treated with an IVC filter, a little wire basket lodged in the inferior vena cava between the clots and the heart. It is procedure, not rising to the criteria of “operation”—no general anesthesia, small incisions, directed by x-ray, if I’m understanding.

Meanwhile, she has achieved “ward status” which, when it first came up, sounded very much like she’d crossed some threshold in a frequent flier program, but which actually means that she is ready to leave the ICU as soon as there is a bed in Trauma Surgery.

This is good news, of course. But for us, so scared, so shaken, the people of the ICU have been heroes using intelligence, capability and teamwork to get us through the most dangerous thing we’ve ever faced. We love them.

When they do rounds, there’s a moment when the person leading the discussion says, “Ok, on to fast hugs.” And then they go back to the litany of fairly incomprehensible status reports delivered at pace.

First time I heard it, I thought, “Ok, these guys are compassionate but they are driven—there’s only time for fast hugs.” Turns out it’s a diagnostic mnemonic.

But the sentiment still holds. Fast or slow, hugs all around.