(Typing fast, I’ve only got two minutes…)

Wha-a-a-t! That’s not supposed to…! I just put that in there!

Context:  Blue Cross helpfully said there were no deductibles on ileostomy supplies this year. Given our $10k deductible and a no-insurance catalog price of $995/month, that was a huge relief. They don’t tell you the fine points during the November enrollment period, nor do they answer the questions they don’t want you to know to ask.

So I was going, oh good.  And then they said that oh by the way that one month supply that just shipped, same monthly amount as ever, was, as of this year, to hold me for the quarter.  Wait, *what*!  Are you out of your MINDS?!

And today, how stunningly bad an idea that was was staring hard at me.

It’s okay. My doctor’s office is on it. (But why should they have to be?)

Michelle was sitting in a cozy spot on this cold, rainy day.  First time I ever saw a bluejay shaking itself off like a dog, or a very soaked squirrel, but I don’t think either would have cared for an offer of a hairdryer. Brrr.

Wrapped up in a blanket, hot mug of cocoa on the arm of the chair, laptop propped up on the other one, safe from all ills.  It cheered me up just to look at her.

I plunked down at her feet. “Can I growl?”

She looked at me. “Okay, you got one minute of whine.”

“Stupid bag burst.”

“Oh,” wincing.  She thought about it a moment.  Then she threw her arms out from under her blanket in a magnanimous, wide-open gesture, and granted me, “For that, you may have TWO minutes of whine!”

We both burst out laughing, and that was the end of that.  Hey, Michelle–you’re a good one.  Thank you.

(Massachusetts voters:  60.  It’s all in your hands tomorrow.)

January 2.  New Year’s will probably always now remind me of January 2.

There’s a whole lot I didn’t write in that post a year ago today.  I didn’t say it was an emergency colonoscopy.  I didn’t say how the doctor wanted me to get some blood tests run, too, but after he saw what he saw he made a point of telling Richard to take me straight home afterwards and not put me through going to the lab that day. He was hoping all that bleeding he’d wanted so much not to see would quiet down enough to make it easier to go in the next day.

It was all downhill from there.

We got a letter in the mail, that, fittingly, arrived today of all days: announcing the new company that would be handling our by-mail meds, which, were I still on it, would have applied to supplying my Humira–you cannot just walk into a pharmacy and buy a biological Rx off the shelf.

So now we know.  Caremark has been kicked out.  YES!! (I tell myself I’m not bitter.  And yet.  It is still true that had they done their job I might still have a colon. Had Blue Cross honored their commitments on time I might still have a colon, not to mention points south requiring that second operation.  They did not.)

But a year later, looking back… All of that is honestly a very small part of the whole.

There is this sense that I can handle anything now.

There is this sense that I can be there for anyone else now.

There is the knowledge that there were people who were there for me through anything and everything, including, to the best of your abilities, so many of you from wherever you were.  You let me know I was not alone and not bereft in that hospital room all those weeks with needles in my arms and itchy plastic anti-blood-clot machines working on my legs day and night, that my mom and my husband keeping watch there and my children who were away weren’t facing this alone either.  I cannot tell you how important your presence in the comments and by your prayers were during those days, the squares that were knit, the afghans that were assembled, the cards that were sent, the Thinking Good Thoughts that got thought. Thank you.

There were doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, even that housekeeper, who made me feel it was important to them that I had passed through their lives and thereby gave meaning to what I was having to go through.  In the process, they, too, strengthened my then-tenuous hold on my own.  How close I came–not that there was any doubt–was brought home to me when I got word two months ago that someone my little brother had grown up with had just had the same liver-inflammation complication of his own Crohn’s; he had not made it.  My heart goes out to his family.

I am intensely grateful to be here with my own family still.  Amazed at the things I can do now.  Intensely grateful at having had our kids home for the holidays.  Celebrate? Oh, honey, there are no words to say how much.  And it’s a whole new year!

The squirrels weren’t diving into those pistachios (I’d been curious).  No, no, thanks, plain sunflowerburgers for me and my bro, hold the mayo. Eww, waitress, there’s a hair in my picture!

A quick note–I hope I didn’t offend anyone, including Ms. Reddy, with yesterday’s bit of snarkiness.  A Mississippi Delta blues song that, to me, totally puts women down, sung chirpy and perky and with an Australian accent–it just didn’t work out well for me.

Okay. Moving along!

I did, however, put my friend Neil’s music on last night before going to bed and I sat in front of the speakers, absorbing the notes in just a couple of favorite pieces before turning in, reveling in how good they sounded with my aids adjusted to the new situation.  Planting something positive in my brain for future five a.m. half-awake brainstorm sessions. It worked.

Today I got a little knitting done in a waiting room: I saw my rheumatologist for the first time in exactly a year.  His nurse got me into the exam room and shut the door behind her before she exclaimed, “You’ve lost weight, haven’t you…!?” having no idea and clearly a little afraid to ask.

I hate having to fill people in from scratch and watching them wince.  But at least then she filled the doctor in for me.

He came in and got the details.  He did a fair bit of wincing himself, while I wanted to tell him, it’s okay!  But then, none of it was new news to me, and I deeply appreciated that what I’d gone through meant something to him.  (And her.)  I mattered. It showed in his face.  Thank you, Dr. F. And Nurse M.

I handed him the UCSF results and watched his eyes as he looked it over.  I told him that Dr. R knew steroids didn’t work on me, but there was no convincing the young doctors from Dr. R’s department working my case in his absence, who were sure that if you just threw enough steroids at that Crohn’s, it would tamp it down at last.  200 mg a day. (That is a breathtakingly high dose.  Granted, they were trying to save my colon and my life. Details.)

His eyebrows raised. “Did it?”

“It did absolutely zero.”

He allowed as how being as laid up as I’d been had contributed, too, but he made the diagnosis definite. Osteoporosis.  At 50.  Walk, he said, good that you’ve started walking again, take lots of walks. Some of the loss is irreversible, but some you can do something about.  And build that strength back up.

Another consultation appointment next week before treatment can/might start, the two doctors want to handle it together.  (Hurry, before we lose our current insurance policy Jan 1…   Don’t get me started…)

Remember when I came to out of surgery in August and the first thing I saw was a group of doctors surrounding the foot of my bed talking to me? Trying to get me to answer their questions?  Their mouths were moving but there was no sound.  Nada.  I groggily asked for my hearing aids, put them in, fumbled the battery cases closed and turned the things on…

And heard nearly nothing still.

Nobody had any idea why. This was not supposed to happen.

Things got somewhat better; then, on my last day in the hospital, I was given a dose of Dilaudid when taking my surgical tube out proved extremely painful–and as that dose went into my IV, it was like turning the volume down on the voices around me with an ever-so-slight time delay.  The Dilaudid. Busted.

I put off getting my hearing tested. I wanted to give my ears recovery time.  But mostly, I wanted not to believe I’d permanently lost more of my hearing, and if I waited, and it was so, then there could be no arguing with it.

There is now no more arguing with it: I finally got in to see John Miles today.   It’s a 5dB loss across the board, all frequencies, both ears, except for one holdout at 1KhZ in one ear that stayed the same.  Mind you, I had already become someone who didn’t hear train whistles or fire alarms most of the time without those aids in.

I drove home exulting at being able to again hear music playing clearly, cranked up high to try to drive out of my brain the horribly kitschy Helen Reddy greatest hits album I had the great misfortune to listen to last week because a friend was throwing it away and I thought I’d give nostalgia a kick, deaf or no. (I know. I liked it when I was 12, too.  Some of the songs were okay, but some–I won’t even tell you the names of those earworms. I’m nicer than that.)

I have smart friends….  I woke up at 5 am with the worst of the earworms singing away gleefully at perfect pitch.  Nooooo…!  I listened to everything today from Camel to Christmas carols.  Cleanse, brain, cleanse!

I still say this hearing thing is worth it.

——–

*Consonants, which are made with the tongue against the teeth, are higher-pitched than vowels, which are made reverberating in the throat, and so the consonants are the first to disappear in a high-frequency loss, which is what most older people have. This is why people sound to them like they’re mumbling.  They’re missing pieces of the words.  That previous sentence would then be “e i i e i o e o.”

Me, I’ve been older since my teens.

Last time I saw the surgeon he got to play Santa. But I missed one nurse from that day: she saw me into the examining room, and we spoke long enough for me to feel she was one who truly cared about her patients too. She just sparkled. I was impressed, and sorry later to have missed her.  I was expecting her to come back in but someone else did instead, the young nurse I surprised with a lace scarf at the end.

Today was my last (oh honey I so hope) post-op at Stanford.  A medical assistant told me they were crazy-busy today, that they had 45 patients to get through. Wow. But when Dr. S. came in, one of the first things he said was how much his wife loved her shawl. The man is a peach. (And so is his wife!)  He was completely focused on me and on taking care of me and on answering my questions; nothing else intruded. I’d been scoped yesterday?  (Thank you Dr. R.!)  We discussed where the bleeding had been and for how long–it finally stopped today; he told me why it was normal there with a blockage, and I came away very reassured.

But he also told me to call him next time there’s any such problem, and he clearly meant it. Having done two blockages now, I needed to hear that. Thank you, Dr. S.

Before I left home, I’d put some of the cuter Peruvian fingerpuppets in my purse, and as he was on his way out the door, I gave him a few for future pediatric patients or for children of patients.  He looked at the fish and laughed.

I saw that missing nurse briefly again in the hallway as I was coming out.  She was talking to another patient, and there was a scale right there with a chair next to it; I commandeered the chair while fishing quickly through my knitting bag for the scarf that had been waiting a month for her.  But by the time I got it out of the ziploc, she was walking briskly away.

I called her name after her. That startled her–Who? as she spun around.  How did you…?

And then she was exclaiming, “These are my favorite colors! Oh wow!” I told her that a friend of mine had dyed the yarn. (Hey, Lisa–the Mardi Gras colorway in merino. Love it.)

I finally got to tell one more person who deserved it how much her kindness and smile meant each and every day to all the people streaming through those doors. Forty-five people is a lot of eased burdens just today.

She was so thrilled. She so much deserved it. She made me so happy.  This is why I do this.

Thank you, everybody, for your good wishes, kind words, prayers and support.  In the self-diagnosis department, it looks clearly now like a blockage, and I heard from one person with far more experience than I at this colectomy stuff that it’s normal for that to have some bleeding with it.

That is SO much better news than a new Crohn’s site. It’s temporary and it’s fixable.

We’ll see what the doctors say.

Talk about timing.

I have my last post-op appointment with my surgeon next Thursday.

Just yesterday I was telling an old friend, as I have a number of people now, that, yeah, I’d had a rough year but it was all over and I’m fine now and it’s a wonderful place to be,  free of all that and with more energy than in ages.

And I got that call from MedicAlert last week, getting things updated; eh, you never know, right?

That you might wake up the morning after their bracelet comes with everything back and staring you right there in the face.  Blood.  The Crohn’s. That bit of achiness at night? It wasn’t post-op normalness after all, and today, food isn’t happy staying down.

My surgeon and I will have more topics to discuss than I had had any plan to. I’ve sent a note to my Dr. R, meantime.  Next week will be interesting.

(Edited to add: my husband just came home from Costco with a huge package of Seckel pears! I’ve been looking for those fruitlessly, fruitlessly, I tell you.  They are THE best pear on the planet, their season is short, they can’t grow here because they need too much cold to set fruit so I can’t grow my own–if you find some, buy them!

I feel better already.  Go Richard!)

At Purlescence I reached back towards some of the baby alpaca on the sale table behind me and got caught wincing. I admitted I’d had a recent near fall and someone had grabbed me on my way over and had saved me. I’m glad they did, but my shoulder’s been begrudging it.

“You need to come with airbags,” one knitter opined about my balance issues.

I hesitated just long enough to almost have some sense of propriety before I opened my mouth and went straight for it and answered her, “I do, now.”

So.  ‘Hem.  Meantime.  I read somewhere that a Slinky toy on a birdfeeder pole will send the squirrels and their ex-seed-ing greed back down to earth.  Curious.  That could be entertaining, along the lines of the kid I saw trying to run up the then-World’s Longest Escalator (the downward side, of course) at the Montreal World’s Fair, Expo ’67.  I was in third grade at the time and stunned, stuck between being awed at his having gotten halfway up–IF he’d started running at the bottom, good and honest–and the idiocy of the idea. I remember looking up at whichever parent was closest and half-asking if I could try that or was it as dumb as it looked.

They quickly affirmed it would be stupid.  And don’t.  I think they could just picture all six of their offspring suddenly taking off trying to beat each other going the wrong way through a crowd unhappy at being pushed at long narrow heights, and somehow that idea just didn’t appeal.

Dunno if they make Slinkys wide enough for my awning poles, but, hey.  I thought it would be worth checking out; we were going to Target anyway.

Ever try to find a low-tech toy these days?

Online later, I did find them. And variations, including–now wait a moment.  I’m assuming someone placed a special order and that they had to make so many and now they’re just trying to sell off the rest of the stock.  (Tell me this isn’t in their normal line!)  How about: 14k gold-plated. Slinkys!

This is so begging for CEO jokes.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around and around and around and…but I think it’s flipping out.  Can you just picture it? A golden pawshake for the high-fliers.

The big annual Labor Day block party.

Random Hershey’s cookbook cake recipe–using mini muffin pans, it made three dozen.  (Note to self: fancy schmancy Williams Sonoma one?  The pan looks artsy, the results, not so much. Go for plain and round only next time, like the ones shown here.)  Bake 13 minutes.

Ganache: 1 1/4 to 1 1/3 c heavy cream, ~17 oz good dark chocolate (one Trader Joe’s Pound Plus Bittersweet bar.)  Break chocolate by smashing bar (still wrapped!) to the floor repeatedly.  Thwack.  Melt chocolate in cream, stir; will semi-set fairly quickly.

Raspberries: rinsed, then carefully individually dried off.

Three of my neighbors in this square block work at Stanford Hospital. One is about to start a new job in a different department; I told her the names of my favorite nurses she’d be working with and to tell them hello for me.

I didn’t mention that the last time before this month that I finished a pair of socks, it was six years ago, done as a thank you to the highly empathetic B. for being willing to walk in his patients’ shoes. Earlier this year, I found myself saying to someone at the nurses’ station, “I’d know the back of that head anywhere!” and he turned and we had a delighted reunion, IV pole and all.

I spoke in church briefly today about a man from a local ward (congregation in Mormon speak), not ours but the next one over, whose volunteer assignment is to offer the Sacrament on the Sabbath to members of our church who are hospitalized at Stanford.

And thus a month ago he found himself with a list of names and room numbers in hand, walking into my room for the fourth time this year, where, there I was, IV and all all over again.  He exclaimed, It’s YOU! How ARE you!

Much better as of right now, and thanks.

Such a simple act: kneeling by my bedside.  The heartfelt prayer.  A little bread.  The second prayer.  A little water.

Such a powerful act: coming to one who cannot come to you.  Declaring by how he lives that there are no strangers now, only friends.  Being with another in their extremity, completely present for them in the moment, offering a shared faith in the light and love of God that surpasses all such circumstances.  He brought to me, in his own way and fulfilling his own part, a healing.

Looking back at all that I went through this past year, I said today, the pain simply falls away: all that is left is the moments of light.  The love.  God’s.  His. The doctors’. The nurses’. Every person who cared.  It is made so visible by their choices in those circumstances.

I still don’t remember that man’s name.  But I will always know that warm smile.

From the day I was told I would have this surgery, I told Dr. S, I started knitting.

But the first thing yesterday was a young nurse who came in and asked me a set number of questions. One was standard for patients who’ve had a resection, but there was no resection done here–I laughed, answering, “Don’t have the body parts for that anymore!”

She clearly felt put on the spot. I remember being young and intimidated by older people (wait–older? Hey!…)  My heart went out to her–it’s okay!  Certainly not something to worry over.

The surgeon was running late and I made him much later. I didn’t want to miss anybody. The more he saw what I’d done as I pulled things out of my bag, the happier he got about the whole thing too.  I couldn’t remember everybody’s names; I’m not great at learning new information when I’m drugged out in the hospital.  I had individual projects in ziploc bags, a card to each, but in some, they were still waiting for the names to be added.  Dear (blank).

He helped by looking up my records and scanning down the screen for me, trying not to miss anybody either. I explained I was on my way to E ward after that to go see the nurses.

You know, he could have thought of his schedule and gotten annoyed at my hijacking his time. Instead, the grin on his face just kept getting bigger and bigger as I pulled out one  after another–let’s see, got Dr. X, Y, and Z here, what was the name of? And…? Anyone else?

“Oh, that’s COOL!” to the piano-pattern hat.  He described exactly the intended recipient I was thinking of, and said, “Oh, that’s Lionel.”

I looked at him, cracking up: “I can NOT call him Lionel. What was his *name*?”

Oh. Right. Dr…

And another–he spelled it out but I just wasn’t getting it. With a high-frequency loss, V, C, T, G and the like all sound like the vowel E: no consonant sounds need apply when there is no context to guess by.  So he tore off a small piece of the paper covering the exam table and wrote it out for me. Okay, got it! (Resourceful on the spot–I like it!)

He held up the pink shawl for his wife and he and the young nurse admired it while I explained the tradition of lace wedding ring shawls. He took his wedding band off and pictured it against the stitches and asked, and I grinned, “Probably better yours than your wife’s size!” while saying that the reinforced neck edge would be the only reason it wouldn’t go through. He loved it.

He had done micro-sized stitches that had healed up unbelievably fast, with so much less pain than I’d expected–I mean, I knew it was a bigger surgery in January, but–and so I was giving tiny stitches in baby alpaca back in thanks. He was deeply gratified.  And to my surprise, a little abashed (but very pleased) at my complimenting his work.

The surgeon who’d assisted him was, as it turned out, the surgeon I’d had in January; her new job wasn’t so far away after all. I was thrilled to get to see her again three weeks ago.  (She’s the one who ran into me downtown last Saturday.)  There was a skein of Sea Silk at Purlescence–the Glacier–in exactly the colors I’d seen her wearing many a time, so, having already knit her a full shawl back then, that skein had leaped out at me  as a scarf for her. A little variety in the wardrobe.

At the end, I pulled a Purlescence bag out of my bag so he would have a Santa Claus pack to haul the loot around in.

And then one more thing: the young nurse, having watched all this going on, was suddenly stunned when I reached back into the main bag, pulled out a scarf that would go well with her coloring, and tossed it (I still had that silly gown on, there are limits to one’s dignity in such circumstances) across to her.

And at last I got to see her really happy too.

Afterwards, I walked over to the main hospital to give out nine more scarves.  Lace flowers to match Stanford’s gardens, lace leaves for the plants, etc.  I went hither and yarn…  I finally got one to one of the nurses I’d had while in the oncology unit back when that had been the only available bed in the hospital last time. She was a good one. She needed to know she was remembered.

Wait, what floor had I been on again this time?  Okay, that’s the bone marrow unit, that’s the post-surgery ICU, been there (says Stanford Accounting, don’t remember it) but not that…  They’d closed off an inner corridor and my visual memory, always shaky since early in my lupus, was just lost.  I got a whole lot of walking done.

I didn’t get to see everybody I wanted to, but when I finally went, oh, duh. Right. THAT floor!, the nurse at the desk got to anticipate playing Santa too, with a big grin on her face. This time, I left the stack of scarves in a sweater-sized ziploc with a list of names. People could pick what they liked. The one person who had a specific one coming her way, in pink to match her scrubs three weeks ago, I did get to see and hug in thanks for her caring. Very cool.

It was her project I had had in my hands when Dr. S had come into my hospital room and, in answer to my query, had said his wife liked that color.  It was her scarf I took to the shelves at Purlescence, looking for a match. And they do.

It wasn’t till I was almost asleep last night that I realized that that blue Half Moon Bay pattern hadn’t come home with me–I’m pretty sure there was one more scarf in that bag than there were names I’d remembered.  Cool.  Maybe that first-night’s nurse whose name and face were lost to my post-anesthesia haze got one after all.

By, say, wearing a cool Sock Summit t-shirt and a Sock Summit pin and wearing Sock Gate-colorway socks, dyed by Tina (you have to knit them first) when actually, no, you weren’t at Sock Summit.

This drive-by knitting gift landed in my mailbox today, from Nancy, crediting JoAnne, with a little tag in there from Ellen, and saying Stephanie approved.  A group hug, it sounds like.  Thank you doesn’t begin to express the sense of wonder at being included like this.  Wow.  Cool.  Thank you!

I confess to cowardice last month: I did tell my surgeon there was a knitting conference. I waited to see his reaction before I was going to specify that it was actually not just that, but a sock knitting conference–and then somehow as we talked about things related to the kinds of stitches he was going to be doing, it never quite came up.

Heh.  I know how I can make it obvious now. Now that I’ve broken him in on the general idea, with my husband enthusiastically nodding that oh yes, thousands of knitters come to these knitting conferences, I can show that indeed we do.

And now that I have been made well at his and the other surgeons’ hands, next time I won’t have to miss it. Or even worry about missing it.  I can’t tell you what a gift that is.

Meantime, this is what Sea Silk looks like in Glacier when it’s damp, which it won’t be for very long. One more finished!  Silly doctors probably don’t realize the post-op is supposed to be a grand reunion time: my head surgeon will just have to go play a knitterly Santa Claus afterwards, I imagine.  Think he’ll mind?

Thinking back to the first pre-op appointment: there was a parade of people, from a medical researcher hoping to sign up a new subject to a physician’s assistant to a younger woman who came in after the doctor with forms in hand, asking my permission to let her be a part of the surgical team as part of her training.

I liked her on the spot and told her yes.

When she greeted me just before the operation last Wednesday, I looked her in the eye, smiled, and told her in a tone that I think affirmed that I believed she would, “Do a good job.”

She stopped by often afterwards to check on me, and Sunday, from my hospital bed, I reminded her that I had said that. And then I told her: “When I was brought into the recovery room, I saw your face.  I knew that you knew you had.  And you were proud.”

I got to see her beaming proudly all over again.

I’ve been thinking for a few days, and it seems only one yarn will do.  There’s enough for a good scarf yet.  If you’ve read the story of the Bluejay shawl, shown above (with most of its fulness at the back of the chair), you understand why the leftover yarn I have from that project would be the perfect yarn for a young colorectal surgeon.  A beautiful outcome from a situation rather less so, and… Yeah. That one.  My way of saying thank you.

And, like every patient–and doctor or nurse for that matter–that skein of indigo baby alpaca, so unusually custom-dyed, is a one of a kind. As far as my dyepot adventures are concerned, having no desire to, say, scatter suet or peanuts or birdseed on my wet hanks and wait for the moment, there will never again be anything quite like it.

A stray thought: as I told Carol, I’m dilaudid to know how to spell that med finally.

I overdid it yesterday. I paid for it. Talked to the surgeon’s nurse. Don’t want to go back in this time around, so I’m trying to take it easier today, but it’s hard to stay down.

While I was knitting away in the hospital, I asked someone their favorite color.  They quite liked the one I was working with, but it was already earmarked and I didn’t have enough of it for two, so I was thinking, not a problem. I’ll just go dye this lovely white that’s in my stash when I get home.

Oh. Wait. Not supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds for six weeks, and how heavy is that dyepot?  Right.  Purlescence may just have to put up with me buying yarn.  I think they can manage that.

So I’ve been finishing up the pink alpaca project at hand, alternating with lying down reading a good book Robin sent me called “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.”  As in, he wouldn’t act like a normal dog: he could climb up and down ladders, trees (down: not so much), walk along six-foot-high fencelines. Marley Fowat is the author, it was originally published in 1957, and I wonder if that’s where the famous dog Marley got his name.

My favorite part is when someone from New York, whose train was just about to leave, got told by the local yokels there on the plains in Saskatoon that Mutt was a Prince Albert Retriever (there was no such thing) and the finest hunting dog on the planet.

He bet them $100 Mutt was not.

It was July, not hunting season at all, but local dignity must be maintained. So the men showed up hoping for a demonstration.

Mutt’s owner got out his rifle. In the middle of downtown.  Mutt was immediately interested but confused because… Summertime? Here? And the guy shot off his unloaded gun, declaring, “Bang Bang. Go get’em, Mutt!”

The dog took off like a shot, nearly mowing two women down. Came back very soon after with a perfect ruffed grouse in his mouth.

The men were going wh a a a …. Then one noticed it was stuffed. Moments later, the owner of a store down the street came running in, yelling about the dog stealing the stuffed grouse they kept on display in their shop’s window.

Hey. Owner uses gun, owner wants bird, owner gets bird, right?

The man’s son, writing this memoir years later, said that that story made national Canadian news.

And it’s helped me take it easy like I needed to.  I’m afraid of letting it end. So I’m up for just a few to go blog.

I was just coming out of my room on Richard’s arm for a walk when a young dad approached with a baby in a front pack, I’d guess about 14 months old,  wiggling her little legs in delight at life in general.

Turned out they belonged to my new roommate.  I got to hear happy baby babbling sounds at the same time I was reading an essay in Sharon Randall’s book about her son’s wedding, wherein she reminisces about what it was like to be a first-time mother to him and how wonderful it was to see her son a happy man with a wonderful wife, and yet, admitting how much she missed hearing the language that only the little ones can speak.

I wanted to hand my roommate the book on the spot.  But instead, when her baby started sounding fussy, I called out to them, (well yes of *course* I had one with me) and offered her husband a fingerpuppet for her, figuring he was the most mobile person in the room just then.

Then I got to listen to happy babbling sounds mixed with little-person giggles. If I hadn’t had a newly-stitched-up belly, I’d have asked for a chance to get to hold the baby, too.

The dad was in and out for a moment here and there, and after that fingerpuppet, as he was coming back in, his daughter in his arms, she eyeballed me with the very biggest grin on her face.  She knew a grandma type on the spot.  I was utterly charmed.

One last thing I had to go through before they could send me home: they had to remove a tube.  It didn’t look so big or bad, really, and a medical student was sent to go do the job.  I was on vicodin, but my stars. I couldn’t help but gasp and I was holding tight to the side of the bed and Richard’s hand.

The student said, It’s not supposed to be this bad, excuse me a moment, and she went running for a member of the surgery team.

They decided to give me a dose in my IV of dilaudad to make it easier on me. Almost immediately after it went in…

…Their voices got thin and tinny like a static-y radio, the highest frequencies (ie some of the consonants in the words) disappeared, and I was struggling to hear.

Oh! Was I on that coming out of surgery?

Yes, answered the resident.

Now we know.  Now we know.  Thank goodness for a tube that didn’t want to come out.  And then when it did come out, I could see why: the part inside was a whole lot wider. Think about a size 13 needle trying to squeeze through a size 5 opening, and they mentioned there were probably blood clots getting in the way as well.

Anyway, that’s done and I’m home.

And came home to what Michelle had described as looking like a pillow from Peru.  It was a thin muslin fabric, hand whip-stitched closed along one edge.  I carefully cut it open and she and I spread out and sorted 100 finger puppets.  Dolls, fish, birds, animals, alligators, bugs, even a few cartoon characters.  Cost with shipping was 36 cents each.

I felt like a little kid counting their Halloween loot. I said to Michelle, “Look at all this happiness waiting to happen!”

She got the first smile.