Note DebbieR’s comment two days ago about the 80-mile drive to Purlescence.
She came with her mom, a kind and gentle soul, and now I know where Debbie gets it from: the kind of people where you walk into their presence and you know you’re among friends. The kind of person who knits fingerless gloves for someone else’s daughter they’ve never met just because they really, really came in handy for Sam, who loves them and all that they convey.
We swapped stories and laughed all afternoon. There was a middle-aged man I didn’t recognize who came in and was quietly knitting away behind their backs, not looking our way, not butting in, but breaking out into a big grin at all the punchlines. (It’s a big room like that.) I loved it. I did apologize to Nathania at one point for monopolizing the soundwaves and she grinned and waved me away, You’re fine.
Pamela was there, and bless her, came over at one point and told me, You’re not drinking enough. She grabbed the cute little 7 oz thermos that Michelle had given me as a souvenir from Japan and went and refilled it, taking good care of me when I wasn’t bothering to myself: without a colon I have to drink 8 oz every two hours. Debbie and her mom approved. Go Pamela.
Near the end, Debbie had a thought and asked, And by the way, how are you?
I hesitated but confessed: I had woken up this morning with BAM, instant Crohn’s flare, totally unexpected and out of the blue. It did get a little better as the day went on–and then all this laughing and loving and I’d completely forgotten about it. It’s not gone, I added, but it’s a whole lot better than it was.
Crossing my fingers.
To be more specific: this morning’s angry belly had had me thinking, if I barf I’m in the ER. Do. Not. Barf. I hesitated, but there was just no way I was going to miss out on this afternoon, and certainly not after they’d driven all this way for it.
And then afterwards I found myself feeling like, and look at me now! This works! (If only it were always so easy.)
I ran a quick grocery run, got home, hadn’t quite finished putting things away when the phone rang.
It was our daughter Sam. She *did* barf, and she *did* end up in the ER. Turns out someone had offered her a quinoa salad at a New Year’s Eve party, not realizing that couscous mixed in there means wheat–and Sam’s a celiac. Throw in a lupus flare and an ITP platelet crash and her roommate ended up picking her up and putting her in a wheelchair and getting her to the ER faster, she told us, than the paramedics could have done it.
The roommate brought her knitting and started and finished an entire scarf in the 24 hours it took the doctors to decide to admit my daughter.
Taking deep breaths and saying lots of prayers. And wishing I could send DebbieR and her mom to make Sam laugh like they did me, while grateful to Sam’s roommate who sounds like she’s pretty good at that herself.