…and more tiring, but I didn’t live through those.
As you know if you follow me on Twitter (and if you don’t, why not? I’m not that annoying), on Saturday, the hospital made Lisa a deal: if she could keep her lunch down, she could go home. She was intensely excited to get a choice of soft foods for her lunch, instead of the usual nourishing chicken gruel (“it looks like bad gravy”), and chose beef stew, which she did, indeed, keep down. The fact that they shot her full of something that put her to sleep afterward may have helped.
Eventually, though there had been a spike in her sugars in the morning, she was given the okay to go home. After waiting a couple of hours for paperwork and someone to pilot the wheelchair to get her downstairs. Okay, waiting for the wheelchair was my fault, but after supporting her in the brief walk to the bathroom, I knew there was no way she was making it to the elevator, much less all the way down to the lobby and front doors.
Which resulted in my pulling up to the pharmacy five minutes after it closed (6pm on Saturdays. Really?). Walk her into the house, get her settled, then head back out to a 24-hour pharmacy to get the new prescriptions filled. While they worked on that, buy some groceries in a scattered, unfocused way. Then stop at Chili’s to get a cheeseburger, because the invalid demands one, and I cannot say I blame her. It’s not like I’m up for cooking.
I get all that done, and it’s my turn to collapse. The cheeseburger is wolfed down, which is quite heartening (my wife does not wolf – that’s my job).
It’s astounding how behind I had gotten on a lot of stuff. Okay, not astounding, it’s only to be expected – but astounding to me… it somehow still felt like Thursday. I had been reading Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest and always went to the hospital with it, but rarely got more than a paragraph or two read. To no one’s surprise, I was up until 2am that night, catching up on reading.
And awakened at 7am by the sounds of cat rugby in the hall. The smaller cat reminds me of the kid in the movie Parenthood who likes to hit things with his head. Except that the cat does not put a bucket on its head. I get up and feed the damned things, then shoo them away from the dog’s food until she comes down to protect her food herself. One of life’s injustices: we moved the cat food bowls up onto a table so the dog couldn’t eat their food, and now they feel entitled to eat hers at will. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it up to the pundits to craft it.
After an hour of playing Lone Ranger over the dog food, I climbed back into bed, thankful it was Sunday and such things were possible. Like an idiot, I hadn’t put my phone on silent, and people starting calling to check on Lisa. Like a freaking idiot, I didn’t put it on silent after the first person called.
There was another trip to the grocery store – this time a list was involved – and an eventual nap. (PS. the alarm on a Blackberry is CHRISTALMIGHTY LOUD) Now, on Monday morning, I think I detect a few more gray hairs on the rapidly thinning thatch atop my head, and strange leftovers litter my life. The towels that never got folded, the laundry merely tossed on the floor. I have daily taken off my wristwatch and my wedding ring and placed them in the same place for years, and today I have no idea where they might be.
There have been rougher weekends, but I didn’t live through them.
My new favorite image, above, is from BoingBoing, and the story is here.
drfreex.com 