Monday- Eat Out night. I had to work on Monday then go to school, and since Kat hits up Yoga we just decided to take it easy and fend for ourselves.

Tuesday- Taco Soup. This is a recipe that I got from my mom. Basically a meat and bean soup with taco seasonings.
1 lb ground beef (we did stew meat)
2 cans diced tomatoes
1 can tomato sauce
2 cans kidney (or other) beans
1/2 cup onion
1 package taco powder
3 cups water

Saute up the onion, add in the beef. after things look good add in the seasoning and then all the canned goods. Add the water as well and then simmer until ready to serve.

Wednesday- Homemade Pizza. We pick up already made dough from one of our local grocery stores. We add on what ingredients that we want and cook them up. This week we did a clone of toppings that we had at Pizzeria Bianco that had Parmesano reggiano, ricotta cheese, and arugula. Very tasty, made a second with mozzarella cheese, tomato, garlic.

Thursday- Chicken Lettuce Wraps- Cloned from Pf Changs, very nice and tasty.

Friday- Spicy Chicken and Rice- Link right here to the recipe, we have had this one before, very tasty.

Saturday- Eggplant Rollatini- another good one, this time courtesy of Mario Batali- Link again right here

Sunday- Our Valentine’s Night Dinner- Grilled Ribeyes with sauteed mushrooms, whipped potatoes and sauteed green beans. Kat was thinking of some sort of raspberry mousse for dessert. Any way you look at it, tasty.

Monday – Paninis
Now that Sean’s back in school, he’s got class on Monday nights until late. The idea is to plan dinners on Monday that allow Sean to eat early and me to eat when I get home from yoga classes. Enter the quickly grilled sandwich. Add some quickly sauteed green beans and you’ve got a quickly prepared and well-balanced meal.

Tuesday – Pasta with Sausage, Mustard and Basil
I pulled this recipe from Food & Wine’s website. Since I’ve already made this recipe, I can give a quick review of the recipe. The sauce and sausage is a good combo, but the recipe calls for a full pound of pasta which thinned the sauce out too much. I would recommend using a half pound of pasta (usually half of a box of pasta). That will still serve a family of four (or two leftover meals for a family of two).

Wednesday – Dinner Salad with Grilled Chicken
The ever present weekly dinner salad. Thankfully, it wasn’t raining on Wednesday, so Sean was able to grill the chicken out on the grill instead of on our grill pan inside. We used Savory’s All-Purpose seasoning on the chicken. The greens and vegetables for the salad came from the Ahwatukee Farmers’ Market.

Thursday – Herb Broiled Fish with Lemon Aioli
Another recipe from Food & Wine. This was served along side a side salad with snap peas and cucumbers. The recipe turned out very nicely and the aioli is incredibly quick to make up (you fix it while the fish is broiling).

Friday – Pork and Shrimp Potstickers
Okay, so maybe this week I went a little heavy on the Food & Wine recipes. I’ve been craving potstickers since a friend of ours made awesome homemade egg rolls for his housewarming party. This is a Ming Tsai recipe, which leaves me hoping for very tasty potstickers tonight.

Saturday – Salsa Verde Braised Pork
I found this recipe in a Sunset magazine in 2008. This recipe is wonderfully easy and the resulting pork is amazing. Serve this with some fresh tortillas and you’ve got a delicious meal.

Sunday – SuperBowl Party!
Some people go to SuperBowl parties to watch the football. I go to the parties to watch the ads. A friend is throwing the party and Sean and I will be going over for some socializing and (hopefully) amusing ads.

We ended up going out on Friday last week so this recipe got moved up to tonight. The recipe actually comes out of a William-Sonoma cookbook for Potato-Leek Soup with Fennel and Watercress. We just leave out the fennel and watercress and add in more leek.

Ingredients:
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 leeks, coarsely chopped
2 baking potatoes, about 1 lb, peeled and coarsely chopped
6 cups chicken or vegetable stock
salt and freshly ground pepper

In a soup pot over medium heat, all olive oil and saute the leeks for about 5 minutes.
Add the potatoes and continue to saute’ for another 10 minutes.
Add stock and bring to a simmer, partially cover and cook the vegetables for about 20 minutes.a
Puree the soup and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Tuesday- Shrimp Dinner Salad

Same as before, but with sauteed shrimp on top. Yes, we always do a lot of sauteing, however I might gill them up depending on the weather.

Wednesday- Spaghetti Carbonara

Surprisingly, another recipe out of a set of Williams-Sonoma cookbooks

Ingredients:
2 eggs, at room temperature
1/4 cup grated pecorino romano cheese
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1 lb shaghetti
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 lb panchetta cut into small cubes
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1/2 cup dry white wine
salt and pepper to taste
Flat leaf parsley

Bring a large pot of water to boil
Break the eggs into a warmed, large bowl, add the cheeses, and whisk to blend well.
Salt the water, add the spaghetti until al dente, 7-9 minutes
While pasta is cooking, warm the olive oil, add the panchetta and saute until just becoming crisp, about 4 minutes. Add the garlic and saute’ for 1 minute. add the white wine and cook until reduced by half.

Drain the pasta, add it to the bowl. Toss quickly (this will heat the eggs). Add the panchetta with all the pan juices. Season with salt and pepper, add parsley and serve immediately.

Thursday- Salmon with Raw Spinach Bacon and Egg Salad with Whole Wheat Rolls

Salmon prepared any way you like it. For the spinach salad we generally boil some eggs, peel and cut them up. Then saute bacon, keeping the fat and adding it to a small bowl and adding in some balsamic vinegar to make up a quick dressing. Crumble the bacon up and add the bacon and eggs to the top of the salad, add the vinaigrette and toss to serve.

We just get some rolls from out local Whole Foods to round everything up.

Friday- Chicken Tacos

Just what it sounds like, but instead of beef we saute’ up some chicken and use that. I made up some salsa to go along with it this week, 1 day ahead so it has time to meld together.

Saturday- Syrah Braised Short Ribs, Creamy Parm. Polenta, Artichokes.

I need to goo look up the recipe for the short ribs, I believe it is in a recent Food and Wine Magazine.
We use a recipe for the polenta that we got from Misty, it has never led us wrong. The artichokes we will do boiled or steamed and then served with melted butter for dipping. Fairly classic approach.

Sunday- Buffalo Bacon Burgers with Waffle Fries and Green Beans

Burgers with ground buffalo, peppered bacon on top, I like mine with Blue Cheese but we can no longer get a blue cheese that Kat likes around here. We used to get one from the Rogue Creamery called smokey blue, it was a smoked blue cheese and just awesome. The waffle fries recipe I am taking out of Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook. We have tried the regular french fries, and we have a mandolin so I will try his recipe for waffle fries since we can actually make the cuts properly. Green beans I usually do up in a fry pan with some garlic, throw in water or white wine and cover to steam them up nicely.

That is it for this week, let us know if you need any more information on the recipes. We have taken a few pictures of the dishes we prepared last week, we will try to get those op shortly, it should entice you to give them a try.

Monday – Seared Tuna with Vegetable Stir-Fry
For the seared tuna, we take ahi tuna, press sesame seeds (black and white) and then sear the tuna on all sides in a tablespoon of olive oil on medium-high heat.

We’ll add lo mein noodles to the vegetable stir-fry to make the dish a little more filling.

Tuesday – Baked Ziti
Pretty standard baked ziti. It’s nice because it’s quick to toss together and it creates leftovers for the rest of the week.

Wednesday – Smoked Ham & Corn Chowder
This is a new recipe from Food & Wine magazine.
Link: http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/smoky-ham-and-corn-chowder

Thursday – Flank Steak Dinner Salad
We usually grill up a flank steak with either Savory Spice Shop’s Mt Massive Steak Seasoning or Pikes Peak Butchers Rub. Lettuce, cucumber, bell pepper, tomato and some sourdough croutons top off a nice meal.

Friday – Potato Leek Soup
A few years ago, we received a collection of Williams-Sonoma cookbooks, one of which is all about soups. Our favorite recipe for potato leek soup comes from this book. Epicurious.com, though, has several tasty ones if you’re looking for something to try.

Saturday – Fried Chicken & Biscuits
I’m southern. No matter how many years I live away from the south, my favorite dish will always be fried chicken and homemade biscuits. The chicken gets soaked overnight in buttermilk. For frying, it gets coated in flour, egg wash and then more flour and fried up in our dutch oven, to keep oil from splattering everywhere.

I have half a dozen recipes that I use for different types of biscuits. Three alone come from The Bread Bible. One of my favorites, though, is the one I grew up with and that’s the recipe for rolled biscuits in the Joy of Cooking. My grandmother used this book, my mom uses this book and now I use this book, so it’s got some heritage to it, which makes this one specific recipe all the more special for me to use.

Sunday – Roast Lamb with Polenta and Roasted Vegetables
Roast lamb is quickly becoming a standby favorite for Sean and me, especially with how much more accessible it is in the grocery stores now. Take a rack of lamb, coat the outside with a good deli-style mustard (please don’t use yellow mustard!) and then roll it in panko bread crumbs. Sear the outside over medium high heat in a tablespoon of oil and then finish in a 400 degree oven until cooked to your liking. We like lamb medium-rare, which is the traditional temperature to serve it at.

Soft polenta and some roasted vegetables (whatever looks good at the grocery store when you’re shopping) rounds out this nice and simple meal.

Monday
Greek Chicken Salad
Salad greens with cherry tomatoes, cucumber feta cheese and a vinegrette dressing. Grilled chicken with Greek Seasonings from Savory Spices.

Tuesday
Pork Chops with homemade applesauce and grilled asparagus
Fairly simple, just grilling up the pork shops with some seasoning, probably from Savory again. Asparagus gets grilled as well with olive oil, salt and pepper. The applesauce we make by peeling and cutting up granny smith apples, then simmering on the stove in a combination of mead (honey wine) and water, if you do not have mead then water by itself is fine, just use enough to cover the apples. Add sugar and cinnamon as necessary at the end, use a stick blender to puree’ it up or you can use a regular blender just be careful.

Wednesday
Salmon BLT
We stole this from one of our favorite local breweries- Four Peaks.
Grilled or sauteed salmon filet with bacon, lettuce, tomato, cheese and pesto on whole grain bread. Their recipe calls for jalepeno jack cheese and Cajun seasoning on the salmon, but we have substituted out other flavors with no problem, this is a nice tasty dinner.

Thursday
Chef Dinner Salad
Yep, another Salad, we decided that with all the rich food lately a second salad for the week would not be a bad idea. This one will be salad greens with had boiled eggs, bacon, ham, cucumber, tomato, green pepper and cheese on top. I like jalepeno ranch to go on top, Kat generally goes for a chipolte cheddar dressing we found.

That is it for this week since we are headed out of town.

Living Room Before Shot:

Underlayment in our entry way (This is the first layer to go down before the flooring):

Finished Flooring (no baseboards or furniture yet):

Everything Finished (with furniture moved back, too!):

Since the flooring was going to be ripped up and Sean had access to the area between our floor and walls, we finally put the surround sound in that we’ve wanted since buying the house. We even did the smart thing and put wall plates with plugs in the ceiling so that we can take the speakers with us when we move.

Surround Sound:

So, that’s what we did over Thanksgiving weekend. It really took us almost the entire weekend, too. We made several trips to our local Ace Hardware as well as the Lowe’s and Home Depot up in town. We also ate a lot of our meals outside on our patio (it’s chilly in the mornings/evenings by November!). My parents were a great help. I really don’t think we would have gotten it done without them. Thanks guys!

Monday – Red Beans & Rice
Served with fresh French bread.

We had ham for Christmas and pretty much if we have a ham, that means Sean requests red beans and rice for the following week. This time, we tried Cooks Illustrated’s recipe (Jan/Feb 2010 issue). Since this is a staple Cajun dish, I have my family recipe, but I’m always willing to check a different version out.

Tuesday – Chicken Dinner Salad
Sean and I are big salad fans. This is pretty much a staple in our menu. Almost every week, we have some sort of dinner salad. We usually choose between chicken breast, salmon, shrimp, tuna or flank steak for the protein and then toss in whatever veggies we feel like. Add salad dressing and you have dinner in usually under 15 minutes (the meat does have to cook, unless you pick up a roasted chicken from the store on your way home).

Wednesday – Paninis
Yet another staple in our weekly menu (sorry, my creativity was gone when coming up with my menu this week). The best part about this meal is that you don’t need a panini press to make paninis. All you need is two cast iron pans and you’re good (if one of them is a cast iron griddle, you can even get the grill lines on your sandwich).

For bread, we usually use the artisan sourdough bread from the grocery. Mainly, though, you’re just looking for a firm, large piece of bread. We usually stick with a couple types of meat, one type of cheese and then a couple of veggie fillings to round out the flavor. For meats, we go with ham, salami, prosciutto or any other Italian meat that we’re fancying when we get to the deli. For cheese, we normally go with provolone because it melts really nicely but has a small bite to it. For veggie fillings, we’ll use anything from olive salad to roasted red peppers or artichoke hearts.

Preheat one of the cast iron pans (this should be the griddle if you have one) over medium heat. It shouldn’t be smoking, but it should be pretty warm. Take two slices of bread, brush one side of each slice with a little bit of olive oil. Place one of these slices on the cast iron, olive oil side down. Put whatever fillings you want in your sandwich onto the bread. I would recommend starting and ending with cheese, as this will hold the sandwich together really well. Place the second slice of bread on the sandwich, olive oil side up and put the second cast iron on top, weighing the sandwich down. Flip the sandwich when the first side is golden brown. Take off the pan once both sides are nice and golden brown. Let sit for a minute and then slice in half. Serve with a small side salad or just chips for something quick.

Thursday – New Year’s Eve Dinner!
Three-Ingredient Prime Rib Roast (Food & Wine, December 2009)
Butternut Squash Gratin – This is a recipe from Sean’s aunt Patty that is great as a side or works well as a main dish (which is great since two of the people we’re having over for dinner are vegetarians)
Green Beans – nice and simple saute with garlic
Roasted Parsnips – olive oil, salt and pepper and roast them in the oven with the rib roast (also works well to do this with potatoes)

Dessert: Hot Chocolate & Fresh Chocolate Chip Cookies
To keep the dessert easy, I’ll make up the cookies the day before and then prep the hot chocolate so that all I have to do is combine the dry ingredients with the milk.

Friday – Black-eyed Pea Stew with Sausage (Food & Wine, January 2010)
I’ll serve this up with another small side salad to keep it nice and simple for a good start to the new year.

Saturday – Leftovers
Whenever I do stews and soups during the week, we usually have lots of leftovers at the end of the week (even with us taking in leftovers for lunch). This means that I’ve got time to do chores on this day and still provide a good dinner at night.

Sunday – Cacio e Pepe (Cooks Illustrated, Jan/Feb 2010)
This is way simpler than it sounds. It’s essentially pasta with cheese and pepper. Should be a nice meal to start off the next week with and provide some tasty leftovers for lunch.

Here’s the plan that someone very smart suggested to us and we’ve spent the past 6 months following with great success. Every Saturday, we plan out our menu for the following week (Monday through Sunday). This gets recorded down somewhere. For us, that means it gets put into a Google Calendar that Sean and I share (it’s called Weekly Menu). In order to keep just one of us planning the menus, we swap this chore of planning the menu. So, each one of us only has to do this every other week.

Sunday morning, we make out a grocery list of everything we need to buy to get us through the week of dinners. Here’s where we deviate slightly from the plan. We eat a lot of fresh foods in our house (fresh vegetables, fresh meats, etc) which precludes us from completely shopping for the week, so we split our list into two. We’ll shop on Sunday for Monday through Thursday and then on Friday for Friday through Sunday. Fridays are usually the least hectic of our week days (Sean rarely has classes on Fridays and they haven’t extended beyond noon yet and I don’t have any yoga classes after work on this day), so this works out pretty well.

Okay, so that takes care of making sure that a menu has been planned for the entire week and that groceries are bought in a timely manner (instead of in a rush on the night of dinner making). That leaves making sure that the weekly menu is posted somewhere so that everyone in the household is aware of the plan and whoever gets home first can start working on dinner. Before Sean and I had iPhones (and thus constant access to our Google Calendar), we used a paper weekly menu stuck to our fridge.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering how we manage to come up with a weekly menu without running out of ideas on a regular basis. We have a lot of different resources we use, some online, some are cookbooks that we constantly refer back to and some are food magazines that we subscribe to. Here’s the rundown:

Online
epicurious.com – This is the online form of Bon Appetit which is a great food magazine. This website’s got several useful tools to help you plan menus. First, the search function allows you to search under a large variety of options, one of which is “quick & easy”. This option has found me some great ideas for week day dinners. The other tool is an iPhone app that you can download for free. This app gives you access to the database of recipes and allows you to create a shopping list from recipes that you add to your cart.

Sunset.com – Once more the online form of one of my favorite magazines in the world (thanks Lisa!). The magazine is meant for the western half of the United States and covers everything from traveling to gardening, but the online Food and Wine section can be used anywhere in the country. There’s a Fast and Fresh area where one can find easy and healthy recipes.

Food & Wine – Yeah, yeah, so I like food magazine websites. They’re rich resources of past magazine recipes. This magazine tags each of their recipes so that at a quick glance you can tell if it’s Fast, Healthy, Vegetarian, Make Ahead, etc. The website allows you to search under these tags, which is yet another way of finding just the type of recipe you’re looking for.

Magazines
Any of the above three magazines are great ways to start finding recipes. Why would I recommend spending money on the magazines when you can just download the recipes? It’s because these magazines offer more than just recipes to find. They offer techniques and advice that I find invaluable as someone who is trying to learn to cook better and healthier.

Cooks Illustrated – This magazine is beyond words for anyone who likes to cook. It offers a Quick Tips section where readers can contribute ways they’ve found to save time or resources in the kitchen (For instance, one reader suggests freezing leftover chicken broth in ice cube trays so that when you need some again you can defrost small amounts. I love this suggestion. In fact, when I make my own chicken stock, I do the same thing). The recipes in this magazine are also well thought out and written down. Each recipe comes with an article describing why they’re doing the recipe the way they are (why use small red beans over kidney beans in a Red Beans & Rice recipe). This helps expand your knowledge as a cook at the same time as getting a vault of great recipes to use. The one thing I’ll caution you on is that they don’t frequently do “quick” recipes, so if that’s all you’re looking for, you’ve been forewarned.

Cookbooks
30-Minute Meals – I’m not a huge fan of Rachael Ray, but I have to admit her cookbooks (I’ve got two of them) have saved my bacon a few times when I’ve needed to toss together a quick meal. She’ll give you recipes that will create a full meal and they really are ready in 30-minutes or less (including prep time).

My Personal Recipe Book – Sorry, no link for this one and that’s because this is quite literally a personal recipe book that was given to me as a wedding gift from awesome friends and family and has been expanded upon over the past 6 years (and counting) of marriage. Any time I find a recipe that I like online or in some of my magazines, it gets cut out and put into this 3-inch ring binder. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve poured over this book looking for ideas and I’ve rarely come away empty handed. The best part about putting together a book like this is that as the years go by, these recipes start getting stories put to them and they become personal.

So, here’s what I’m going to try to do. Each Sunday, I’m going to try to post our weekly menu so that other people can see how we’re planning. If the menu item has an online recipe, I’ll link to it so that everyone else can find it. I promise that planning healthy and quick meals ahead of time is worth it and it’s doable.

The latest test Sean’s neurologist wanted him to go in for is called a lumbar myelogram. This is a relatively quick procedure where a doctor injects dye into the spine and then a CT scan is performed to see how the dye is spreading across nerve junctions. The hope for Sean was to see if there was a blockage at a nerve junction which would indicate a pinched nerve that hadn’t been seen on any of the MRIs that he’s had on his back.

The procedure went very smoothly and only had a small headache (which is fully expected) while he was in recovery. We went home that afternoon and Sean took it easy for the rest of the day as directed by his doctor and we didn’t worry about anything. So, that takes us to Saturday.

Saturday
Saturday morning Sean woke up feeling pretty good. He rested for most of that morning and then when I went out to wash my car, he came out and helped me out. We figured it wasn’t too strenuous and it would give him a chance to start doing things around the house. By the time we had finished washing the car he had gotten a really nasty headache, so he went in to drink some water and rest. I finished up cleaning out my car and when I went in, he was feeling a good bit better, so we had lunch and finished up some tasks around the house. At this point, Sean’s headaches were starting to come more frequently and his neck muscles were really fatigued. So long as he stayed in a slightly propped up position, he was fine though, so we just agreed that he would rest for the rest of the day and Sunday and continue drinking fluids. I had to leave for the airport that night so that I could be in at my customer’s early the next morning. I didn’t like leaving Sean, but he assured me that he would be fine, so I flew out that night.

Sunday
Sunday was the same as Saturday. Sean was fine so long as he didn’t spend more than 10 or 15 minutes doing anything. He kept resting and when I got home that night from my trip he seemed to be doing better. We agreed that he would most likely be good enough to go into class and then work on Monday, so we went to bed early that night so he could get a good night’s rest.

Monday
Monday morning, Sean woke up with a headache, but he figured it would go away once he took a shower. He wasn’t great, but he figured he’d make it through the day. I left for work. He went into class. By the end of class, his headache wasn’t any better and he had to rest in the car for a few minutes before he could get to work. At work, things went downhill really fast. He got nauseous and dizzy and threw up a couple of times. After the second time, he realized he needed to go into the ER because something was wrong and he wasn’t healing like he should have from the myelogram. He had also talked to his neurologist earlier in the day and he had recommended possibly getting a blood patch (more on this later). I was in a yoga class at this point, but got a text message from him as soon as I got out. Thankfully, the ER (also the same hospital he’d gotten the myelogram at) is only 2 miles from my yoga studio. By the time I got there he was still going through triage and was looking pretty miserable. Blood was drawn for tests and we were finally admitted to a bed (well, it was really a recliner, but you get the idea). Once we had talked to a doctor, they hooked him up to an IV and gave him dilaudid. Sean started to feel a lot better. After another hour, they also gave him a caffeine drip which helps open up the blood vessels in the head, easing his headache. By this point, it was 10pm and the doctor came down to tell us that the anesthesiologist was really busy and didn’t recommend doing a blood patch, so we could go home with prescriptions to help with the nausea and the headache. We finally got home at about 11:30pm. Sean was feeling a lot better, so we didn’t worry too much more and crashed (Well, I crashed. Sean had just had caffeine injected into his system. He stayed awake for a while longer).

Tuesday
Tuesday we both woke up a little later than normal (I think we’re both entitled to get a bit extra sleep after a night like Monday). Sean started feeling bad from the get go, but he at least wanted to go into class that morning. I went into work and he headed off to class. Sean didn’t make it through his entire class. His English professor looked at him and told him to go home. I need to remember to send baked goods into her after all of this. So, Sean went home. His condition continued with him only able to be upright for about 10-15 minutes before the headaches came back. He continued drinking plenty of liquids and he took the pain drugs that the ER doctor had prescribed him. I skipped yoga Tuesday night and went straight home to see how Sean was doing. Even though Sean wasn’t doing well, we decided to see how things went for the next day and we would go from there. Went to sleep at a decent hour. Neither of us slept well, though.

Wednesday
Sean didn’t even get out of bed when I went into work that morning. By 11am, Sean called me up and told me that it had gotten to the point that he couldn’t stay upright for 5 minutes. We agreed that he needed to go into the ER, but neither of us felt comfortable with him driving himself and I couldn’t leave work until 2:30, so we agreed to wait until I could get home and I would take him in. Got home as quickly as possible, got Sean loaded into the car and we were back up at the ER (hi guys! Remember us?) by 4pm. Thankfully, the ER was a lot quieter this time. We also came armed with a lot more information on what Sean had been going through and how risky a blood patch really is. We were back in a real bed within about an hour this time. The ER doctor we talked to agreed that we needed to talk to an anesthesiologist and that he would page the one on call to come down. In the mean time, Sean got an IV and more dilaudid. Sean started to improve once again after he got the dilaudid, so waiting wasn’t too bad. The anesthesiologist (seriously people, could they not have come up with an easier name to type for these people?) finally came down, talked to us for a few minutes and quickly agreed that Sean needed a blood patch and that there were minimal risks for complications (chronic back pain can be a complication from the procedure) and that she had done a lot of them with no issues.

Okay, so here’s a quick run down of what a blood patch is and why Sean needed one. When Sean had gotten the myelogram done, he had gotten a spinal tap done in order to get the dye into his spinal column. This leaves a small hole towards the bottom of his spine in which spinal fluid can leak out. The reason he has to stay prone for a day or two after the procedure is to minimize the spinal fluid that leaks and allows the hole to heal on its own. The spinal fluid leaking creates a low pressure area in his head, thus causing the headaches that are common after spinal taps. The hole in Sean’s spine wasn’t healing as quickly as it should have, thus causing the continued issues. The procedure for a blood patch is to take blood from one part of your body (just a small amount) and inject it into your back where the hole is, causing a clot to form that “plugs” the hole. This keeps the spinal fluid from continuing to leak out while the hole itself has a chance to heal.

I got shoo’ed out of the room and Sean got prepared for the procedure. About 20 minutes later, the anesthesiologist came back out to the waiting room and told me that everything had gone well. I headed back to Sean’s room and sure enough, Sean was looking a lot better already. Apparently, the blood patch is supposed to cause a very quick change for the good, much to my relief. We got to stick around the hospital for another hour or so just to make sure that everything from the procedure looked good and then we were finally discharged. One stop at In-N-Out for dinner (it was after 9pm at this point, so cut me some slack. We got the best food for what was open) and we were finally back home. Sean immediately crawled into bed. When I got up, I convinced him that crawling into bed and at least getting under the covers were two different things. Finally, the day was over. Sean was doing remarkably better already. Sleep came well that night.

Now
Thursday and Friday Sean stayed home and rested. He started to test himself on walking around the house for short intervals. The headaches were almost completely gone. He wasn’t completely back to normal, but he was definitely getting better and quickly. Since then, he’s continued getting better. He’s still got the occasional headache, but he can move around and he’s pretty much back to normal functionality at this point. Saturday night he threw a great birthday party for my 30th birthday and we had a great time. Today we got chores done around the house and he seemed to be holding up pretty well. I’m now on a plane heading back up to Denver, but this time I feel like things will go a lot better while I’m gone. He’s promised to take it easy this next week and not push himself too hard.

We’re still unsure what exactly is wrong with Sean’s back. The neurologist said that the CT scan came back with nothing abnormal. We’ve talked to the Mayo Clinic up in Scottsdale and they’ve agreed to take Sean’s case so all of his records and tests up to this point have been forwarded to them. Sean’s got an appointment at the beginning of December to go in and start talking to the doctors there. We’re just keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that this is what it takes to find out what’s wrong and what we need to do to fix Sean’s back.

To everyone that’s called/e-mailed/posted on Facebook over the past week, thanks for all of the well-wishes. They certainly made it a little easier getting through the week knowing that we have so much friends and family out there supporting us, even if it’s just with a thought in our direction.