i'm alive!!! i survived the surgery!!! my recovery hasn't been too horrible. the procedure went well despite some complications---it was only supposed to be 45 minutes and it turned into 2.5 hours...giving my parents quite the scare in the waiting room. my lil' incident in hong kong had actually caused a fairly large gall stone to slip out and lodge itself in the bile duct, making it difficult to remove the gall bladder initially. what perfect timing...that gall stone could have started up an infection and caused some serious damage. so my surgery came at the perfect time, removing what we were trying to avoid. it took me a really long time to wake up from the anesthesia and i didn't get home until the late afternoon. when we got back, i found these beautiful white roses from meg sitting at my doorstep..what a sweetheart. since coming back, things haven't been too bad with the exception of yesterday morning when i actually threw up bile. i didn't know that was possible....very disturbing. i've been slowly walking around the apartment today, with the help of some very strong painkillers. I'm hoping to take my parents down to the Market today because it's such a beautiful weekend...and olke's having a bar-b-q because his dad is in town.

The night my parents came in, we had a dinner with some friends that they've never met: eugene, eric, christina, ryan and james. We ate at Top Gun, the usual, and had a fabulous dinner. it was nice for my parents to finally meet all these people.

i wonder when i'll be able to return to work. the only pain right now is from any activity using my stomach muscles. it feels like a combination of getting hit in the stomach really hard and having done 2000 situps. plus, i get a little whoozy from the painkillers. my diet has been rather mild so i have yet to test what i can or cannot eat.