You’re going to need another skein, I told myself.

What? I’ve got an hour’s worth of work before that hat is finished! I argued back.

You’re going to wish you had.

Well hey if I do run out then I can sit there and stare at my phone like everybody else does.

The cardiologist’s office had asked me to come fifteen minutes early.

There was only one doctor running behind.

Patients came. Patients were seen. Patients left. And then the next round. The nurse I’ve known forever said hi on her way by to, I think, lunch.

I started dreading a little the thought of being called back there mid-row once the decreases got down to the last few dozen stitches: not when you want to have a needle slide out as you jam the thing in your purse.

And then I was opening up my wallet and unzipping the coin part for the thing it’s really there for: the yarn needle, attached to the end from the previous hat. Ends: run in.

I pulled out my phone and read the news.

They finally called me back an hour and a half after I’d arrived. The doctor apologized; I laughed it off, no worries. I finished my hat!

He took his time, as he does with all his patients. Palpitations? Not since being on that med? Good.

So for the next two weeks I’m on a heart monitor for last week’s fall and light headed episode. But, he said: we’ve followed each other a long time. (All of his career at the clinic, and he’s my age. He read my first ECG when I was 32.) You’ve been remarkably stable (he didn’t say, for a lupus patient.) If you went to the hospital with last week’s ECG they would panic and throw all kinds of tests at you you don’t need, and this this this and this are why, so this is just to get it in your record that things are the same as they’ve ever been.

He also said something admiring about the hat but also something about the color that I didn’t quite catch. I didn’t want to fish for compliments by asking him to repeat and I didn’t want him to think I was giving it to him because he’d made it sound like he was asking for it and I didn’t want him to take a color he didn’t like in order to be nice. So it simply came home. A chance missed to deafness–and my trying not to hold him up for whoever was next on his schedule.

Next time I’ll think ahead and be a little more ready. And I will definitely take a second skein.