It's Mom's third day after getting paroled from the hospital. My brother Art and nephew Jonathan arrived yesterday.

Now that the dust has settled around the discharge papers we can report the casualty count: Two medicines prescribed with no prescriptions; one medicine given to patient to take home to which patient is allergic; steroids prescribed by a doctor that didn't know patient was being discharged; and home instructions issued by another doctor that directly stated the opposite of what the general discharge instructions instructed. I'm going to have a talk with Methodist's administration very soon.

Mind you, we think Houston Methodist is a great hospital. It has great people who are competent and really care. All except whoever designed their patient-doctor relations protocol. We suspect that person was probably raised in a concentration camp or maybe got his GED behind the walls of a mental institution.

Now the good news. Mom took her first walk outside of her home. I imagine it must have been like watching the first man ever to take a space walk, Alexei Leonov, back in 1965. Mom stepped out, gingerly, tethered to her walker and escorted by Jonathan Philibert. Granted, I didn't watch Leonov myself. I was 7 and I was living in Chihuahua, Mexico, where we had one black and white TV that received one channel. I don't think Leonov's walk made it to the program line-up.