Swimming

I started mentioning to Samuel at about 2 weeks post surgery that he would be able to go to the pool soon. He usually demurred and seemed uncomfortable with the idea of swimming. That's fairly understandable, but, it's one of those things I worried about. I worried that he would not be willing to go back to the pool. It's probably silly, but, that was what was going on for me.

About a week ago he came up to me and said, "I'm ready to go to the pool now." That simple. He's directing his recovery and is out-pacing my wildest imagination for recovery. My fear was wholly unwarranted.

We started lifting at the gym this past week. Just light machine weight, but we started. All the stuff we used to do before surgery, including me blocking bad shots he makes with the basketball. Yep, we had a throw-down yesterday and he won. Even with blocked shots.

Today we went to the pool and he swam. He started off mugging for the camera by dunking me in the deep end. That's my hand looking for sunlight:

Once it was "adult-swim", we had him get in, since it was much less crowded at that time, and try swimming some freestyle. He was willing as you can sorta see below:

We started at the shallow end and he swam, slowly, but all the way to the deep end. We rested a bit and then he headed back:

Here he is just at the end of a lap of freestyle:
He is awesome. I told him that this is important so that he will be back in shape for swim-team next year at Branham. That meant something to him! ;)

That was all the lap swimming we did. We kept the rough-housing to a minimum but went ahead and played a game we invented that only works in a pool with old-fashioned gutters, "Gutterball":
Simply, you try to get the squishy ball into the gutter. The goal is as wide as your arms. There's a lot more rules to the game. At this point, I was just happy to have Samuel hitting on all cylinders.

Wound update: His chest wound is healing nicely. He is able to run a towel down it to dry off and let me tough it lightly last night. Don't let anyone tell you that recovery from surgery is not improved by being in shape!

Swim meet & updated scar

Samuel had a swim meet today. He swam 3 JV events, 50 Free, 50 Fly (his favorite stroke), and the second leg of the 200 free relay. He was as always, happy to be part of the team on a sunny day (clickage on image, will embiggage):

This is his second length of his 50 free event:

He loves Fly. Here is is heading down the pool. He was looking pretty strong:

He's starting to fade, but a little encouragement and he picks it up.

And his dive for the leg of the free relay:

He was almost to the end:
As always he loves to swim and above everything else, he likes to be a part of the team. His team mates check in with him and encourage him. It's cool to see. I know he feels accepted.

I had promised to get a picture of his scar as it has aged over almost 15 years. I had a camera, he still has the scar and his shirt off... That's all you need:

If you look a couple of inches below the scar on his sternum, you'll see a smaller scar. This is from the drainage tube they put in his chest to drain off extra fluid immediately after surgery. They took it out a couple of days later and dropped a couple of stitches in to close it up. I assume that is fairly standard procedure and he'll likely get another.

What will be interesting about it all, is to see how big the new incision will be and where it will be. Will the incision be as long as his existing scar or will it be longer? Could it be shorter? Will the drainage tube be in the same place? When we meet with the surgeon, I'm not likely to care about this, but if we get past our initial questions and have time, I may ask anyway...

Mr. Smiley:Yes, he is that dark. He has my skin, as does his sister, and he gets much darker as the summer goes on...