Advent graces

I've been out of the blog scene the past few days because my dad had emergency surgery Saturday morning.
It was (and still is, to some degree) pretty scary. He remains on a ventilator but is doing well, all things considered.
Basically he perforated a hole in his colon; there was also a mass at the end of his colon that they took out and as I understand it pretty much got the whole colon out too.
If all continues to go well, they'll reattach everything at a later date.
His doctors and nurses are excellent, and he's in great hands. I can't say enough good things about the medical team caring for him.
In addition to that, here are a few graces and observations:

--People are there for you. We have received so much care and love just in the past three days it's hard to articulate and give thanks adequately.

--The main nurse I see every day is a guy named Eric. He treats my dad so tenderly. When he's putting in a new drug or something, he'll say, "Here you go, my friend."

--When you are in a waiting room, that is not the time to jump into another group's conversation and interject your political venom. This happened to us Sunday. Someone in our crew brought up something about President Obama and this man, at least five feet away, yelled out something stupid and stomped out. Dude. Really?

--Hospital food is not as bad as some say.