Poop Shute

Noel is doing so well. The Doctors expect to send her home tomorrow.

The best sign that she is doing better is that her sense of humor is back in full swing. Allow me to give some background info to help me explain that.

Because of her head injury she has lost control of the left side of her face. The Doctors are optimistic that once the swelling on the brain goes down it should return, but in the mean time they have her wearing an eyepatch. Her eyes don't like to move together yet, so she is supposed to alternate which eye is wearing the patch, so both get some exercise, and neither one gets lazy permanently. But again, that should mend itself once the skull-swelling goes down.

I couldn't resist the whole pirate mythology that the eyepatch invokes, so last night we brought her in a fur-covered pirate hat, a hook and a rhine stone (sp?) covered eyepatch and took pictures of her as the bejeweled pirate queen. She got a big kick out of it.

Though that was fun for her, the biggest laugh came when she had to kick us out for a minute to use her special potty chair. When we walked back in Meg just casually asks "so, how was peeing?" with a big grin on her face. No's initial facial expression was part shock and part humor and then she suddenly started laughing so hard for so long that you'd think Meg had said the single funniest thing in the history of mankind. I've never seen Noel laugh this hard in the entire year that I have known her, honest to god. It's actually probably a good thing that she had just finished peeing, because she might have wet herself with the laughing. As a result of her full body laughter, Meg and I got caught up in it and it quickly turned into a threeway giggle-loop. Just when one of us would be almost done, someone else would start up all over again, and we'd all just shake and tear up. We must have gone on like that for five or ten minutes, at least.

Later, I was trying to get her to do her breathing exercises when her friend Samantha was there and Sam got her laughing again and she said "I can't do these exercises while I'm laughing." Then I mentioned "so, how was peeing" and she started all over again. It was great.

Good times. Even in the hospital, we three have good times.