Sunday 3:45 p.m. ET

I just wrote a letter to my parents that included a brief update on Eli, so I'll just be lazy (it being the Sabbath and a day of rest and all) and invoke the grand twenty-first century tradition of copying and pasting:

"She’s doing better, though not great. They’ve had a devil of a time getting her IVs in and have collapsed one vein after another to the point where she needs another surgery to insert a line beneath her clavicle. The up side of this is that she will undergo no more pokes for a while; they can just draw blood straight from the line. The down side is that she must undergo another operation, which means another pre-operational fast and, since the OR appears to operate under the constraints of no schedule in particular, they tend just to start her fasting, indefinitely, and call her down when they’re ready for her. The poor kid has fasted for at least 8 hours every day this week. And she hasn’t exactly been enjoying a stream of steady and uninterrupted repasts in the interim (she threw up again earlier today, once more in response to the distasteful ordeal of an enforced iron supplement). But she has been happier. She’s now got a sharp nurse who kindly helped adjust Eli into a more comfortable position, arranged for Lia to hold her for a while, and gave her a much-needed bath. If things continue to go well, Eli could receive a new shunt as early as this coming Wednesday and could come home as early as next Sunday."

Lia told me that earlier today she grabbed onto a three-pronged cord with her little fist and, when Lia chided her not to touch those cords, Eli tightened her grasp and smiled impishly.