Carry On

A patio chair with arms,  converted using a couple of hard (extremely glamorous) cushions into the perfect post hip surgery place to sit. We are very creative, and too cheap to buy a proper office waiting room chair.  I hope we are able to disassemble it and let it go when the time comes.

My November Day Seven

Our house looks like some kind of strange geriatric bomb hit it.  Pieces of furniture are shoved to the side to make wide enough spaces for a walker to pass through without knocking things over.  We have crutches propped in a corner, a fancy high-rise toilet conversion thing in the bathroom and a sit down bath tub/shower seat which we will be trying out shortly.  There are pills everywhere.  And bandages and surgical tape and alcohol wipes and instructions and information all over the place.  W has a special sling for putting around his foot to help him lift his leg up on to the bed, and a long-handled grabber apparatus to pick things up off the floor and help him get dressed.

W is giving himself the injections he needs once a day (I am SO thankful I don’t have to do that for him) but I get to change the dressing on his incision.  Lucky me.  There are thirty-one staples and yes, I made him wait while I counted them.  Then I shot sterile saline across the room because the valve was stuck and scared the crap out of him.  Surprisingly enough, nursing was not a career I ever considered.

Before I went out this morning to pick up another prescription I tried to make sure everything he might need was accessible and within reach.  He told me not to worry, he had his hooker beside him on the bed.  So that is now what we are calling the long-handled picker-upper thing.  Can’t wait to explain that one to the kids.

I hope none of this sounds like complaining, because that is not at all what I mean to do.  Compared to the frightening impossibly hard journeys other people must face, this is really nothing.  We will carry on carrying on.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

Guy Gavriel Kay

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