He's on his way/She lives! What a day.

On Saturday, my older sister, Amy, was found by two of my other sisters unresponsive and in dire straits in her apartment (long story waaaay short).  She ended up in the hospital ICU on a ventilator and heavily sedated until this morning when the on-coming RN turned off the sedation just to assess her neurological status.  The RN said she hadn't hardly walked out of the room before her manager said, "Um your patient just extubated herself."  Which means she was awake and pulled her breathing tube out on her own.  Then Amy went on to pull out her nasal gastric tube as well.  She is a horse!  Just this morning we didn't know if she'd ever be the same since we didn't know if she'd have brain damage from being deprived of oxygen for who knows how long.  Turns out she has multiple bilateral pulmonary embolisms (blood clots in both lungs) that could/should have killed her but they didn't. 


We waited for Cole's call this morning, all morning. He is traveling to Japan today, finally! He left Salt Lake City around 8:00 a.m. and arrived in San Francisco around 9:30 a.m. His flight to Tokyo was scheduled to leave at 12:55. He finally called just after noon. Here we are all listening around the phone.

Cole said he was the last of the 23 missionaries to make his phone call.  So we talked until they announced his flight was boarding.  Luckily while we were talking, another missionary came over and told Cole they delayed the flight from 1:15  to 1:40, which gave us extra time to talk.

Here's Rick talking to one of the Japanese Elders in Japanese.  Afterwards the Elder told Cole to tell his dad that his pronunciation is good but he has to work on his sentence structure.

So, what do you talk to your son/brother about when you haven't spoken for three months?  Things like:  What was the hardest part of the MTC? The food.

What did you like best?  The music.

How are you feeling?  All better, no more hard core cold.

How are the Japanese missionaries?  Ultra Stylish and super fun!  One Japanese elder is really into the Phoenix Suns and Steve Nash.

The phone's on speaker-phone.  See the duct tape?  You never know when you might need it....just sayin.

Ah, rollin the duct tape.

What a day.