(Photo from yesterday, didn’t take one today.)

Eight and a quarter repeats now after doing 21 166-stitch rows today. I haven’t worked this hard nonstop on an afghan since my grandkids’ cousin was born with a wrapped cord and not breathing on his own for his first fifteen minutes while the hospital scrambled to replace his blood and cool his body in a protocol Stanford had pioneered not long before.

I typed the above thinking a fervent oh, if only, wanting to hug my friend Jody whose granddaughter did not survive that complication.

That baby’s mom and dad needed a tangible symbol of all the hope and prayers sent by everybody.  I didn’t have the stash nor funds for more superwash merino to do it in one color, it was stripes the length of each skein and friends chipped in with more skeins of their own to be a part of the cause. Ten days start to finish.

I was told afterwards that that baby emphatically did NOT like to be cold. (Gee, I wonder why.) That made me all the more glad we had sent him our warmth.

He is turning 13 this year and doing fine.

Do you ever get yourself to keep at it by telling yourself that if you do this one row, you’ll never have to do it again? That that one row at least will forever be finished?

And then the next and the next and the next and the next.

This blog post brought to you with thanks to the makers of blue ice therapy gel packs.

I blocked the preferred escape route of the desert rabbit–I put a planting pot saucer in its path–and haven’t seen it since. Instead, a California ground squirrel showed up the next day to graze the low-lying broadleafs.

Never google them. They nest in large colonies, and if they don’t have one, two of them will make one, fast. They destroy your trees, they dig under your house in intricate tunnels, they eat everything and they will brave going up your fruit trees and its tree squirrels if that’s what it takes.

But I just see the one, and it’s chunky and cuddly-looking and pretty. But I think I’ll invite the rabbit back.

Turns out that in the Bay Area, ground squirrels have recently been documented hunting and eating voles. When the vole population explodes so do their attacks on them. Did you have ground squirrels on your apex predator list? They are if you’re a vole.

Meantime, in my brother’s very gerrymandered district (he lived an hour away from it when he moved there), two white Republican men and a Black man who’s a Democrat were running. And we’re talking Georgia.

That Democrat got the most votes in today’s special election. Honey, we are getting there.

Three weeks ago: hospital.

Two weeks ago: under strict orders not to be on his feet. Church for him by Zoom.

One week ago: still not up to going to church anyway, and that foot stayed propped up under continuing doctor’s orders. Church for him by Zoom.

Today.

Our friend Russ was holding the door open for us as we passed through at the end of the services.

I turned back to appreciate what I’d just seen: the joy in his face at Richard’s not only being there but looking so intensely normal. You wouldn’t have known at all that anything had happened to him. Russ had visited him in the hospital; he knew. Our eyes met.

His “He looks great!” was from the heart and the light in his eyes said it all.

Stop! What are you doing!

The doctor said to scrub the dead skin off.

(This is after finally finally having his foot unbandaged and free to wash up at home now without risking contaminating adjacent parts.)

You’re drawing blood! (Thinking, let’s not not not do those seven months over.)

Well yeah it’s a little red, I was scrubbing.

No! You’re bleeding. Look. You cannot do it that hard.

(Oh.) I can’t feel anything…

Right. That’s why you let me do it.

(Racks for discouraging small footsteps and gnaw marks.)

You know, I told him, planting that tree–we were just following the Biblical admonition.

He looked at me, wondering where this was taking him…

You know: Blessed are the peachmakers!

Well, that was hellacious news to wake up to. Felon47 wanted a war of his own? Those Epstein files are cutting awfully close.

Writing the rest of this in hopes that someone finds it who’s facing doing this process and hasn’t ever yet: if I can, you can.

After he spent nine days in the hospital on IV antibiotics, it’s been a week of two and a half hour at-home infusions at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and a different one at 2:30 p.m. that takes five minutes per stopwatch to slowly go in but then it’s in, all three requiring I take the med out of the fridge an hour beforehand. Timers are our friend. We both got taught how to do this so that between us we wouldn’t forget any steps on what was at first a highly unfamiliar and uncomfortable process.

Don’t touch the blue part! (He was carefully holding only the bottom of it.)

I am so you won’t pull on it. (There being a needle at the far end for him.)

So, with some hovering mid-air between us, I screwed the other piece on without touching the blue it was screwing onto. It worked. Alcohol wipe, saline infusion, alcohol wipe, med, then alcohol wipe, saline, plastic cap. Oh yeah and the open/close the valves part: if it’s not going in, that’s where it went wrong. The number of valves varied. If it’s only almost not going in, that’s the stopwatch med, it wants to make you go as slow as you’re supposed to with a full minute between partial pushes and that timer is absolutely necessary.

The one thing I don’t get, though, is going through all the steps to completely disinfect my hands and then grabbing a paper towel to dry them. In college I had a job on an assembly line for *plastic medical goods and I saw how that place was run, FDA cleanliness regulations or no. (I would have reported them, had I been able to figure out how back then when a simple phone call to the East Coast could cost you a day’s wages, or figure out how to even get that number. Today’s generations have no idea how much better their world is because my parents’ peers broke up the monopoly of Ma Bell.)

So. A paper towel as a germ-secure tool? Seriously? But then after the antiseptic and the towel they have you Purell and shake, no towel. Well alright then.

The last IV is about done and the fridge has officially reclaimed its space for food. Unscrew, alcohol wipe, cap it off and we’re done. The PCC line allegedly comes out Monday morning, but we’ll know for sure after the doctor sees that foot.

Baby steps.

* Let me hasten back to add that those were not items along the lines of these syringes, they were larger plastic items used in hospitals, like barf bowls. Still.

Still randomly laughing. He didn’t say, but I bet his wife had thoughts on the subject…

Last week I offered the surgeon his choice of a few hats. Another one was on my needles just then–he knew I’d made them.

He hesitated and his face looked as if I’d put him on the spot so I assured him, You don’t have to. It took him a moment but okay, he found a shades-of-brown Rios one and let me give it to him.

And I thought to myself, You’re thinking skiing and Tahoe and adequate warmth and I’m sure you do have some synthetic thing more windproof than these. No sweat. The irony is that the one he did take was the least warm of them–although, the easiest to tuck away.

Today was a post-op follow-up and I’m the one driving at the moment.

I almost laughed (don’t, don’t, I didn’t) when the guy near the end stopped and turned away from inspecting stitches to me and asked me about his new hat. With quite a bit of enthusiasm. He told me how much he loved it. How he keeps it in his pocket (which he patted.) It was so soft! Was it wool? ..Merino? (Said hesitatingly, apparently unsure that I would know what merino meant. Oh you sweet summer child.)

I told him yes, merino, that it was super wash treated so you could run it through the laundry but it would fuzz out so if you don’t want that then hand wash, and that it was hand dyed (let’s not get into the granularity of kettle dyeing descriptions.)

He very much appreciated it.

And I so wanted to tell his wife thank you. Still laughing. He’s a quick and willing study, for sure.

Years ago, I was doing Stitches West via wheelchair.

I had inherited a wheelchair pressure cushion (something like this only I think heavier duty) from a late friend and it was so comfortable that I ended up commandeering it for my knitting perch. I’ve had it about 25 years now. It has lasted.

So. Friends drove, we carpooled, and at the end of the day putting all that back into their car I heard something.

What. Is. That. Sound.

Oh, we heard that ever since this morning, they said, we just didn’t know what or where it was.

Turns out the nozzle had somehow come slightly open: the entire joyous day of running into old knitting friends and fondling new yarns, my seat had been playing whoopee cushion.

It flattened out about a month ago and Richard could use it right now so a friend came by with a bicycle pump today and we got it nice and full and it seems to be holding just fine and I guess I just knocked it loose again while rummaging around for something. Yay. But it takes me straight back to that bemused, feigned-nonchalance answer from my friend. Just before my disbelief and then our all cracking up.

But my story has been completely outdone.

Richard’s first night in the hospital, they looked at this 6’8″ guy with the operated-on foot in this normal-person bed and went, nope, and moved him down the hall to a bigger one. Still a tad short but better.

Friday, someone decided this just wouldn’t do when they did in fact have one longer than that, so while he was walking the hall with the nurse they moved that one into his room. Great.

Except.

By the next morning, after I’d started timing the (insert definitive expletive of one’s choice) thing, he’d figured it out: it was an air mattress. There had to be some small leak somewhere. That steady jackhammer-loud blast that went off for 50 seconds out of every five minutes round the clock?

So. Loud.

That was the sound of its compressor helpfully pumping it back up.

C. Striatum and Staphyloccocus Aureas are not our friends. But the pathology report finally came in today saying the surgery had cleared all the edges.

At 4 pm, he finally got to climb in the car on this ninth day and I drove him home.

His dad years ago needed to use a cane and refused to consider it. I went looking and had one shipped to him that I thought might change his mind: solid wood with cut-out grooves winding up it in a lighter shade. He declared it the nicest he’d ever seen and used it. (Score!) It was sent to us after he died.

Today we found out it was long enough for his taller son and it met the discharge requirements re mobility aids. Yay.

It is 8:40 pm and we are still waiting on the promised delivery of the IV meds that I’m supposed to start him on in an hour. A nurse will come by tomorrow, Sunday and all, to run the next set and make sure everything looks good.

He’s home, he’s home, he’s home.

—

P.S. At 9:20 it came. Ideally the refrigerated antibiotic is supposed to be left out an hour or two to come to room temperature (and must not be run under warm water nor put in a microwave), but they told us straight from the fridge is fine–it just feels really cold going into your veins. And of course that’s the one he needed tonight. Out of the icepacks and into his arm.

Been there, done that, threw on three warmed hospital blankets when it was me, so we’ll find out how it goes for him. But he’s got it and it’s going.

A week of driving to the hospital in stormy weather: yesterday I walked out to my car just in time to see a mom and teenage boy at theirs next to mine taking photos of the large limb a eucalyptus had dropped on their car. Not sure if the branch on the other side had been part of the first or not as he pulled it out of the way.

Today, blue sky and new snow on the nearby mountains.

I did not park under the trees.

This afternoon we watched a video and then with Richard and a nurse watching I practiced sanitizing edges and connecting examples of IV meds and saline syringes and how to do which dose how fast and how often. You set everything out in order on the sanitized tray and then you work your way across according to specific time intervals. (Write it out, I said. Yes they will.)

And then they kept him there.

The tall balding absolute beanpole of a nurse who loves his patients and looks and has a ready smile like Alex Pretti got assigned to him this evening and I didn’t say anything to the guy because I’m sure he’s heard it a lot and how can it not break your heart all over again.

Friends came to visit.

Turns out that from church this week, G had a pulmonary embolism, J had a burst appendix, L had a stroke, Richard of course…

And someone had a baby a few days ago.

I remember the wild thoughts with our first of, They’re sending ME home with this tiny thing? They think we know anything about being parents? Don’t they know we’ve never done this before? Don’t they know we have no idea what on earth we’re doing?

And then, day by single long day, you find out you can, in fact, do this, that you do learn as you go and it’s the wanting to do your best by others that makes it all somehow, inexplicably work out.

It’s all about learning to trust the life that is in us.

Home tomorrow maybe. Third toe needing detachment too maybe. PCC line is in. The final Infectious report is not.

Another day, got interrupted amidst decreasing so a few rows left to go on project #3–only because I didn’t realize I’d done 68 stitches not 70 (did I drop some of the cast on?) until it was the day’s worth of work and it took me a few minutes to figure out whether/what/if I was going to do anything about it. So sad too bad the decreases aren’t spaced perfectly, if it doesn’t pass the galloping horse test put it on a Ford Mustang and rev it up. It’s just a hat. I’m not doing it again.

Hat, cowl, hat. After reading up on his infectious agents I’m not letting anything I’m working on touch anything there it doesn’t have to no matter how good he looks.

Which stashling should I use up tomorrow.

The slightly taller/broader RN was the guy who leaned his head in Richard’s door briefly yesterday morning after he’d seen me go by before I had any idea who he was and said something I didn’t catch, ending with, Thank you, with a big smile, and disappeared as fast as he’d come.

So I missed most of the words, but the joy! It was palpable. His whole being absolutely radiated love and my first thought was, he must have confused us with someone else, someone he loved.

Later we got the rest of the story.

The other outcome was that my husband decided there had to be a better captions app than the two I’ve tried and went searching till he found the one the others should have been like all along–one that actually works in a conversation in a room with background noise and with people at various distances away.

I cannot begin to tell you how life-changing that is going to be. It already is.

Thank Stanford for fighting insurers over billing, clearly, because of how it got us bumped to that other hospital. Not a sentence I’d thought I’d be writing.

When I said that podiatrist customer had changed lives? I had no idea.

Turns out there were two kids running the ski department of that outdoors outfitter. The customer helped the one get into podiatry school.

The two good friends who’d been working side by side there never saw each other again.

I came around the corner this morning and standing at the nurse’s station with his back to me was a middle-aged man with the same general build, the same haircut, the same touch of gray at the ear–but he seemed too tall and a smidgen too broad to be our doctor.

Richard’s hospitalization had brought them to the same floor.

Our doctor’s friend had gone to nursing school and was now the senior RN on the floor. There each other was. For the first time in all these years.

The bed was upright and it probably helped to be tall; he assured me, No–trees, clouds, I can see out the window. Not all of it but yeah, I can see.

Good, I feel much better about that.

Meantime, I was stepping out the door today when a crow tumbled–no other word could describe it–out of the holly bush right in front of me and took off on foot, one disjointed wing at a funky angle after its roll down that prickliness.

I later did a search on whether crows fake injuries to lead you away from their nests, and the answer was, very rarely; they’ll be aggressive, they’ll caw for other crows to help them defend and mob, but faking injuries is pretty much for smaller more vulnerable birds, especially ground-nesting ones.

We’ve all seen crows playing king of the mountain at the tippy top of the highest tree around. They like height.

So, let’s see, there’s a snowy plover video here. But that one faked it with both wings. This was just one, and its quick walk was a bit awkward, too.

It couldn’t possibly have had a nest in that short holly bush–there’s no room in those tight spaces for a bird that size even if it wanted to. It was probably there to go after the berries. I wondered if one of the very small species that sometimes does nest in there (with a name like flycatcher you know they and their meals are small) had attacked it from inside there when it landed? I don’t know.

Did you run under my car. How am I supposed to get you to leave.

Now it was up against the neighbor’s house near a bush, that wing and walk still odd. My holly was out of sight and it did not fly to return to it. It cawed loudly, one loud yell, a pause, then another, just as a hawk soared from behind that house and coming into my view–but I don’t think the crow could see it yet. Huh.

I said to Richard later, If it actually was injured, why would it call attention to itself by yelling like that?

To call in reinforcements.

Oh of course. Yes that makes sense.

There was a neighbor I don’t know taking a determined fast walk just then, barbells in hand. I almost asked her, Did you see that crow being weird?!

But the question, um, might have seemed a tad close to home on the part of the one asking it so never mind, I didn’t.