An Operation at the Cleveland Clinic

Paul's surgery for lung cancer at the Cleveland Clinic has left me neglecting this "dear diary." He is home now and what follows is the initial writeup I did.

Good Recovery for Paul After Lung Cancer Surgery

Paul is showing a very good recovery today after undergoing four hours' surgery at the Cleveland Clinic yesterday. This morning his color was good and he chatted with Philip, Kim, and me quite readily. He asked me to print off crossword puzzles and bring them along next. This afternoon they removed him from the ICU to a room up on the ninth floor in the thoracic step-down constant nursing unit . There they will re-introduce him to getting back on his feet.
He had in effect two procedures. The first surveyed the lymph nodes in his right lung. Fortunately, they were fine. The second op opened his chest, spread apart the ribs, and removed the cancerous growth at the periphery of the left lung. In doing so, they took only ten percent-of the lung--a good outcome. Phil and Wendy spent most of the day with me yesterday and P and Kim visited this morning. We're very happy with the way things are going right now.
Because the Cleveland Clinic campus is so large I did a lot of walking yesterday and today--and don't feel any the worse for it, either! Last evening when I walked in front of the lobby of the Inter-Continental Hotel, I saw a group of people surrounding an elderly middle-eastern couple who were climbing into a large, black European-looking car. They looked very regal. (A lot of gold glistened about them). One chap in a long, black raincoat stepped menacingly toward me--a bodyguard I guess.
I fell into bed gratefully last night in the Guest House. License plates on cars in the lot came from nearly every state in the union, and while waiting around yesterday I talked with people from San Francisco, Idaho, Kentucky and places in between. I thought, well, Cleveland is a gloomy town much of the time, and the weather is nothing to write home about, but we have the Clinic right here--and that's worth a thousand blessings.
The TV in my room brought in Abu Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait--and a Syrian movie was playing on another channel.
A cousin, whose wife is recovering from a cancer removal under excellent British National Health care, expressed the following sentiments in an email today:-
"We have found that talking about the illness somehow lessens its bogeyman severity. Forgive me for doing so when you have your own concerns. "

(Thank you David. I agree and I think we share some of the same verbal genes).