another recovery day

good evening to africa and europe and good morning to the americas. we had a stable night and and she is making small steps to recovery. they said to us from the beginning that the icu period will be around one week, so we are on day 4/5 and it looks like the ventilator will come off today. she has some fluid on her lungs and they do not want to treat it with the draining drug lassex as that can have an effect on her currently stable blood pressure, so they are hoping that she can cough the fluid off once the pipes are out. they are still keeping her sedated so that she can heal. she does not like the tubes down her throat  and wants to rip them out when she has her brief awake moments. she is also on antibiotics and a whole batterie of other drugs, very confusing to us but these teams have so much experience on how to treat these patients after this massive heart surgery that we just have to put all our faith in them. she gets monitored one on one at all times by a highly trained and competent nurse called brandi with the cardiologist coming around every hour. she has varicose veins stockings on her entire legs to prevent the formation of clots and some massaging apparatus on her lower legs to increase the bloodflow through the body. mike does the day shifts ( 12 hours ) and i do the nightshift ( Kymmie prefers to call it the graveyard shift ). sadly she had to leave yesterday, she has been a pillar of strength for bobbies and us and has done everything possible to assist us in these trying times, for which we are very grateful to her. your sms and e-mails are cheering us up, it is nice to get news from home. we will have another beautiful day today in california with summer temperatures during the day and icy nights. in about a weeks time it will start raining here too and getting cold again. i do hear some voices there from the semi desert country that say they had enough of the rain??????