a long awaited flower.

If you've ever visited my office, you may have noticed a rather large and ungainly plant sitting on my window sill.  At first glance you may wonder why I would keep such a plant.  It looks like a random collection of stems and leaves with no discernible pattern or structure and nothing that particularly draws attention to itself.  With this last thought in mind, perhaps you could visit my office a hundred times and see this plant without ever really taking notice of it.

The plant is a night blooming cereus, and if you were in my office right now, however, you couldn't help but notice the plant because it is blooming.   This homely and otherwise unremarkable plant produces some of the most beautiful and fragrant flowers I have ever seen - if you've never seen one it will literally take your breath away. 

 

Sorry for the cell phone picture, but it's all that I had with me when I stopped at my office to check on it tonight.  It'll give you some idea of what this massive flower looks like:

Thanks to our friend Flora, Emily has had one of these around ever since college.  I've since started several plants off of the original (which met an untimely end due to an early freeze) and so you might think of this as the grand-daughter of the original.  In all that time it took nearly 5 years for the original plant to bloom, and though we have seen them bloom several times by now five years is a long time to tote an ugly plant around.

I guess seeing this bloom tonight made me think of how much we appreciate things for which we have had to wait a long time.  Emily has been waiting for two and a half months for a Coke and tonight she finally got it.  After a few sips a quizzical look came over her face and she said:

"It tastes different than I remember."

She enjoyed it all the same.  She also enjoyed her first real food since she went into the ICU - chicken parmesan.  From this news you can probably tell that she had her swallow study today, and is officially swallowing like any other normal 29 year old woman.  She was very proud of this fact when she came back from her test, and she was excited to be getting real food and drink again.

Today she saw recreational, occupational, physical, and speech therapists, and by the time I arrived this afternoon she was worn out.  She's growing stronger each day, and is excited about all of the challenges and possibilities of rehab.  She's also looking forward to visitors, so if you happen to be around UNC stop by the 7th floor of the Memorial Hospital and say hi.

As a side note and a proper end to a post about a flower, Emily can also finally have real live flowers again, although she has greatly appreciated all of the creative ways that people have smuggled fake flowers and pictures of flowers into her room.