Back to the drawing board

So,

[Retrospective]
After we threw up the other night, we were grounded from eating and drinking anything until my body starts reestablishing its own natural order of things, meaning no more vomit and producing its own BMs, and then a natural appetite.  So, yesterday we enema'ed, and not much later released stuff, and led to 3 diarrheas later.

And then we waited.  More therapy, we're wandering around lazily with a cane now, and I am now completely off the pain meds.  So, as my wife said, "Did you rejoice in the small victories?"

However, we still had no natural desire to eat, and the room still spins really fast.  Various people have made fun of me because I have tried to non-loserishly describe the direction and speed the room spins.  And there were moments,where the room would spin at multiple revolutions per second.

Close to bedtime on the 21st, I was starting to scrape at the bottom of the barrel.  I'd been pretty positive most of the time, but this evening I was really starting to lose it.  You should know that I'm a religious person, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon).  I actually wasn't going to talk about religion on this blog, but oh well - I guess it's part of who I am.  It's hard to talk about religion without talking about faith, which is kind of where I wanted to go here.

I know the word 'faith' has its own set of definitions, but the way faith works for me is as follows:  Stuff happens, and it's okay.  That's really a short definition and all.  More specifically, I believe that the reason we are sitting here on earth living, having families, working, etc. is not the end of our existence.  Particularly, after death, at some point our bodies will be restored and our families can be brought together again.

I really do believe that.  Therefore, most of the time, I see death not as the end of the line, but as a change -  a retirement or a graduation.

However, as many people who believe in God, I also believe in prayer.  Here's a sentence that sums up the purpose of prayer for me: The object of prayer is not to change the will of God, but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant, but that are made conditional on our asking for them.   For me personally, I find it difficult to reconcile these statements, or when to invest more in one side than another.  However, they are enough to swell the "God doesn't care about me" or similar attitudes.

So what I do typically is pray for assurance, guidance, and peace.  As we've been going through all this I've felt strongly that it isn't time to go yet, and that He will yet bring us through it.  At this point it's just been so hard to see.

My wife and I then had a nice cry-fest (where I think I elicited almost a tear), and I spent the next while praying, and I found it hard to hang onto any hope of pulling out of it, but I found the strength to keep trying, and after a minute I found one small, faint symbol of hope (think Star Trek - one life sign, very faint): the teeniest desire for food.