re: Tom Bietz (6)

Hello all,

Tom is out of "recovery", although he is still recovering. He is in the step-down unit that he's been in for most of the week. He has, from the sounds of it, a rather large incision in his head which is causing him no small amount of pain. More importantly, however, when Judy asked "do you know who I am?" he responded in typical Tom fashion, saying "I think I would know my own mother." He can move all the things he should be able to move and seems to be himself as far as we can tell. So it looks as though the surgery was a huge success at least in the fact that it hasn't robbed us of the Tom we all know and love. Obviously we can't know yet if it has completely stopped the seizures, but so far all the news is pretty good.

Ok, the matchbox analogy was maybe not such a good one. That's what I was told, and I tried to relay it accurately, but it seems to have confused more people than it helped. Now I've been told that apparently it was more like if you took a full deck of cards and cut it in half, it would be about that size. I know it sounds big, but I remember that when Dr. Williams was showing on an MRI how much they were going to cut out, Judy had said that it looked like quite a lot, to which Dr. Williams replied, "Oh no, we can cut out all this bit and he'll still be fine." Now, I don't know exactly what "all this bit" meant, but it was apparently a much bigger portion. The piece is also comparable to your pointer and middle finger from tip to the second knuckle, give or take. Hopefully between those three analogies, something will make some sense.

Anyway, the real point of this is to say that Tom is out of the official recovery stage and seems to be doing well, albeit with a massive headache. Hopefully he'll be home soon, but we don't really know anything about that yet. We'll keep you posted...

Once again, Phil standing in for
Ang Janzen
signing off.