I had questions.

Who designs a new hospital such that there’s a big window in the room but the patient in the bed cannot see out it? His view was entirely blocked by the curving wall of the bathroom on the side of the room where the head of the bed goes. Maybe to entice the patient to start to be ambulatory? Okay, but when they most need to see the sky, anything at all beyond the whirrs and the beeps and the medical gear? They can’t. Only the light reflected off the wall over on that side. The mind boggles.

Maybe they were trying to protect from shattering glass in an earthquake? That’s the only thing that made sense. But Stanford is more seismic-safe in their new building and they didn’t do that. (The new seismic code went into effect a few years ago and a lot of hospital buildings got replaced.)

My view at home with the coming storm putting an exclamation point on the colors.

I had another question I wasn’t ever about to ask: how does one aspire to, I mean, cut off toes when one grows up? What would pull someone to that?

The podiatrist came in and, having a little time today, out of the blue chatted a bit about himself.

He’d thought of going to medical school but being a pilot sounded pretty cool, too, and he was leaning that way. Meantime he was working at one of those big outdoor outfitters, fitting people to their new ski boots–and he was good at it. Really good at it.

A podiatrist came in with his son and complimented his skills. That led to the doctor saying, You know–you really should be a podiatrist. Podiatry needs you.

He believed in the young guy, his enthusiasm rubbed off on him, he (the good now-doctor reminiscing chuckled) pulled some strings and got him in. And so the kid did go to medical school so that he could become a podiatrist, too, and here he was.

And I thought gratefully, one random stranger taking the personal interest and the time for someone else’s child changed so many lives.

He took off the bandaging a nurse had changed not an hour before to inspect how it had done overnight. It frankly looked a lot better than I thought it would: how does one make sense of half a big toe and the missing one next to it? How does the mind look at that and think yes, yes, that makes sense.

It doesn’t but in those skilled hands it had become okay, and I understood now how Richard had so trusted the guy to make the right decision and then to do the thing right. That foot looked the healthiest I’d seen it since August by far. It was such a relief to have all that infection we’d fought and fought against in a slowly losing agonizing battle for half an hour every night month after month simply–gone.

Two canceled trips to see grandkids last year.

There will be healing, and then we can start to plan our life the way we envision it again. It’s been awhile.