My friend Don found himself calling 911 in acute pain last night and is in the hospital. They haven’t pinpointed the cause yet.  He asked that I let my blog readers know.

He’s not at Stanford, rather another local hospital where I used to visit someone frequently and where my lupus support group meetings used to be held, so I know my way around there pretty much–that part shouldn’t be a problem.  I didn’t manage to get there tonight; visiting hours would have been over by the time I could have gotten there, but I hope to tomorrow. After yet another doctor appointment (the staph infection came back again after the antibiotics finished again. Round three.) I have asked and been promised that with the bag over it and much handwashing and Purell-ing, I will not be spewing germs around as I go.  But if any of my medical-profession readers feel otherwise, please let me know, even if I’d wish not to have to hear it.

Oh, and just to rat him out, his 79th birthday is next Tuesday, June 2.

I so hope he’s okay!

I’ve gone from a calm yeah, yeah, whatever–hey, no blood through the stoma, which they were glad to hear, so how bad can it be, to wanting to type a screaming NO NO NO NO NO!!! to semi-calm again.  Yes, we did go to Urgent Care, the deciding factor being that there’s no question they would have access to my electronic medical records there; the peer pressure via the blog was very helpful in getting me out the door, and thank you.

I did not know there was such a thing as drinkable lidocaine with maalox. I told the doctor I preferred chocolate.  He chuckled.  He came back awhile later and asked if it helped; it did. I got the impression he almost hoped it didn’t, that he wanted to be wrong.  Looks like upper GI inflammation.  That area would be your stomach, and…  What do they treat your Crohn’s with?

…oh.

He allowed as how he could do a full workup with a CT scan, but it could wait till tomorrow with the GI doctors taking over. Oh, right, sorry, Tuesday.

We got home.  The phone rang. My friends Valerie and Al: his mother was visiting, they wanted to go to Santa Cruz but she wasn’t up to the walk, would it be possible to borrow my wheelchair?

Hey, not only a wheelchair.  When they got here, I apologized for the ratty-looking air cushion that we hadn’t replaced because of the unspeakable price tag, so please, no keys in the pockets, it’s punctureable.  But the chair alone would make her sore after a half hour or so, and with the cushion she’d feel wonderful however long they took and wherever they might go.

I took a risk and let my cushion I can’t afford to replace go to make an elderly woman I’d never met before today more comfortable in her day, and it totally made mine.

Of all the times she might have visited, of all the days they might have decided to drive over the hill to the beach at Santa Cruz, I needed it to be today, which they could never have known.  And so they did.  I can just hear the wheels going bumpitybumpitybumpity down the boardwalk from here.

(p.s. Today is my son Richard and his wife Kim’s first anniversary, and I can’t tell you how grateful and honored I feel to have Kim in the family. Happy anniversary!)

My doorbell just rang: my next-door neighbor, box in hand.

I instantly knew what that meant–they did it again?

Sandy told me that UPS had come in the ten minutes she wasn’t home and she returned to find this box, which she wasn’t expecting, and when she looked at the return address, then she REALLY wasn’t expecting! But then, oh. It was addressed to me. Silly UPS, they did it again. That’s the second time they’ve left something at her house that was supposed to be mine.

I looked at the return address and went wow, and then, hey, Sandy, you want to stay here while I open this? Heh.

No, no, she grinned, starting to scurry away from it.

We got into a conversation, though, about how her kids are doing; always good to hear.  And about how she was doing.  I love how the UPS guy promotes neighborliness–I’ll have to tell him thank you some time.

I brought the box inside and told Michelle what had just happened. I held it out for her to read the return address, her eyes got big, she grinned and she grabbed it and held it away from me, going, “Mine!”

Hey you.  Gimme that.

Then she offered to help with the packaging tape on the inner container. Okay, back up a moment here: I was at Trader Joe’s yesterday and asked the folks there, Where’s the Scharffenberger? I came to stock up on Scharffenberger and I don’t see any!

Oh, we discontinued that about three weeks ago.

But, but–then where do I get my Scharffenberger fix?! I thought, Trader Joe’s, how could you?  Don’t you know, I was standing there in this store when you got your very first shipment ever, watching your employee open that box, getting the very first bars off the top you ever sold?  That’s my chocolate!

And guess what shows up on my doorstep. Wrapped in reusable icepacks and a styrofoam cooler, with instructions as to where to recycle the styrofoam once it gets just too old to keep using.

Scharffenberger. 48 5g squares, one non-guilty-size bite at a time.  Extra dark, bittersweet, and semisweet.  Could there BE a more perfect form of chocolate?  The note inside was signed, “Chocolate is as important as humor.  –Don”

Wow. I’m speechless (you know one doesn’t talk with one’s mouth full.)  This is beyond cool. Thank you, Don!!

I debated quite awhile yesterday whether to tell that story; E. is wonderful, but I knew it was a hard one to read.  Far harder to have lived the beginning of it, as she can well tell you, and the pain can never end; it’s just that love eventually refuses to be drowned out in the cacophony.

Her daughters have now given her adorable baby grandsons.  A.’s name continues on, and a toddler’s smile and small arms reaching upwards to be picked up by a thrilled new grandmother…  Thank goodness for the little ones.

First, happy Mother’s Day to my Mom, a superbly kind woman who deserves the very best every day and always.

Next, a story…

When my oldest went off for her freshman year of college nine years ago, one of her classmates went off to a campus in California.

From where, two days later, his parents got the call no parent should ever have to endure. A frat. A hazing.  Alcohol.  And their son was gone, just like that.

There was a huge outpouring of the community here at his memorial service, filling the local Children’s Theater where A. had performed, growing up.

There was nothing I could do in the face of a loss I could not begin to comprehend, this child who had survived leukemia as a toddler when so few did, this young man who’d volunteered with childhood cancer patients at the Ronald McDonald House to give hope to their parents as a survivor, this child who was supposed to LIVE!

Doing nothing was simply not fathomable.

So a lace stole came to be, in dark navy, soft kid mohair the color of midnight when the stars are faint–yet there. Black seemed too much; I wanted to hold out the promise of a lightening to come, someday and terribly far off but no less real, while acknowledging first the depth of the darkness. I wanted to give his mother a hug to wrap around herself when it was just too hard to take. Which was every single day.  And I knew it.

And then I prayed to know when to take it to the boy’s mother, E., whom I knew but not well.  I didn’t feel an answer to my questioning; the thing sat there for several months. It bugged me.

Then came the day when, as I had done many a time before, I said that prayer asking again, feeling like I was nagging God or something, when the answer came as a sudden emphatic feeling of NOW!

Oh! It was Mother’s Day and we were just about to sit down to lunch–could it wait till later?

But the feeling of Now! was so emphatic that I dropped everything on the spot, apologizing to my family for ditching them this day of all days, and ran with it halfway across town.

A.’s father was outside and told me E. was taking a nap, but he would give the wrapped present to her.   …Meaning that E. wasn’t put on the spot having to appear grateful while trying not to burst into tears; she was able to absorb my note and my gift in private, and somehow, later, that seemed to me to be just as well. I hadn’t done it to stand there to be thanked.  I would say now that the timing worked out perfectly, even though it didn’t seem so at first glance.

Later in the year, Rachel Remen gave a booksigning and I bought a copy of her “My Grandfather’s Blessings” for E.  I explained to Dr. Remen briefly who it was for–there’s a story in there of a mom who’d gone through a similar loss, and I wanted my friend to know there was someone else out there who had gone through this and could understand, far better than I, for all my good intentions.  I told Dr. Remen, “And now I have to pray to know…” and she, looking in my eyes and I in hers, said “when!” in unison.

Again I prayed. Again the answer came to me, at last, on Mother’s Day.  And so I took it over, inscribed to comfort her from the author herself.

After that, I got a clue.  I knew when to go.  I showed up every Mother’s Day on E.’s doorstep. An amaryllis in bloom, the impossibly late last daffodil from my garden, a certain new book of which I was so proud, always something.

My younger daughter mentioned about my illness and hospitalization and her worries on Facebook this past winter, and E.’s daughter read it and told her mom. Which is how E. showed up in my hospital room, bringing me flowers, a visit, and a great deal of comfort that I never would have expected.  She is dear to me.  It meant much.

But she said something that distressed me: she told me I didn’t have to bring her anything on Mother’s Day anymore. But! But!  Although, at the time, it didn’t entirely look like I’d be seeing any more Mother’s Days anyway.

I was on the phone with my son today when my doorbell rang.

It was E. standing there. Bringing ME flowers. And not only flowers, but a blooming plant to put in my yard to remember and think of her and enjoy. She had no idea whatsoever that I’d been wanting a hydrangea anyway in a somewhat bare spot in the yard there–it just happened to be what she felt I might like when she saw it. And I do. Oh, I do!

The light in the colors just bursts through.

My friend Russ, Marguerite‘s husband, played tonight, and I missed Knit Night, but oh goodness, you should hear the St. Michael Trio play!  Three men who trained for musical professions, but one went on into medicine, one into software, and one is a CEO.

I think, though I may be wrong, that Marguerite’s Celebration of Life is how they got started playing together. When I wrote that post, I was referring briefly to my Crohn’s hospitalization of ’03; I had no idea, of course, what was coming.  Just to clarify.

And now they’re Artists in Residence at Menlo College and deservedly so.

They autographed my CD for me.   It’s official: I’m a groupie.

The moving van came Thursday.  I went across the street to say goodbye to our neighbors moving home to Ireland.

It turned out they were staying till Saturday, with a mattress to be left on the floor for them to sleep on.

What about Jack? I asked.  I offered to go look for our old porta-crib that had gone through four kids and was none too new looking, especially after being tucked away for 20 years, but hey.  Michelle and I gave it a good dusting-off and took it over. We couldn’t make them stay, but we could make their leaving easier on them.

They returned it Saturday on their way out in better condition than when they’d gotten it. They are such nice folks. They will be missed.

My friend Kristine, whom some of you may remember from here after this happened and whom I first met when she lived in San Jose before she moved home to Vermont, lived and wrote this in a way that makes the world a better place. Don’t miss it.

Our friends Glenn and Johnna bought a new house and invited a few friends over to see it last night. One fellow there whom I didn’t know looked at my gray hair and commented that he was right behind me. I told him, yeah, but I’ve already got the hearing aids and the cane–beat you!

What I didn’t know, is, he was Glenn’s friend from New York City who happened to study composition under Thelonius Monk. Joel Forrester, whose tune is the theme song for NPR’s Fresh Air, sat down at Glenn’s piano and launched into a performance on the spot for everybody.  Absolutely incredible.

Now, it was Sunday, and my family and I live by very old-fashioned ideas about not working and trying to live in such a way that we don’t make other people work on Sunday if we can possibly help it.  (Or for others, to honor whatever day they choose to celebrate their own Sabbath if we can.)  Which is why I told Joel I wanted to go to Amazon when it wasn’t Sunday anymore and buy all his CDs.

He promptly handed me three along with his card, adding his autograph when I asked, and told me he lived by the honor system and to send him a check whenever the day felt right to me.

He will find that it was postmarked today.  And I happily have new music to jazz up my knitting time.

Friends dropped by. Raspberry brownies (yum!) that they brought for Richard’s birthday (a day late, but they came out of the oven at 11 pm last night) were happily consumed, the conversation was a treat as well, and that’s about as far as I could get for a blog post for tonight.  It was wonderful.

So much to say. I can’t do justice to any of it.

I want to say how my friend Lisa, 20 years ago, decided she and I should go visit John at Children’s, that we did once a week while he was in there and how we got to have the joy of watching him coming back.  How the day Highway 880 was on almost total shut-down from an accident, the one day John’s mother Nanci couldn’t get through–Lisa had previously been a cop in Hayward and knew all the back roads.  She and I got our visit in, not knowing his mom was still stuck back there on the freeway.  It helped her later to find out he hadn’t been left alone after all.

Our time and sense of purpose together during that is what deepened our friendship to where, when I was diagnosed with lupus a year later, she was willing to volunteer to take my preschoolers every morning so I could go do swim therapy. She asked if I would then watch hers while she worked out.  Tara’s Redwood Burl shawl story in my book?  We’re talking about that Lisa.

I want to say how stunned I was to sign today for a package from Canada and find another afghan!!! and then, not only that, it was not one but TWO afghans made from squares people had started knitting in January via a Ravelry group to try to wish me back to good health.  Thank you, everybody, and especially Anne for putting all of those together.  (And for chocolate!)  All the well wishes, and arriving on the day I saw my surgeon, whom I adore, for a follow-up… Wow. What can I say? Wow.  How could anyone be anything but well after that?

And it was kind of funny, because for a moment there when I gave my surgeon her black cashmere shawl as I’d waited so long to be able to do, it was almost as if she might protest something silly like I am not worthy!

And now here I sit feeling myself precisely in her shoes. Wow. What I haven’t said on the blog, is, I had that allergic reaction but also a staph infection on top of it and we’re still fighting it.  The afghans are a great comfort–this little bit of illness now is nothing.  I WILL get over this.

I’ve only begun to look at that Ravelry site. I want to savor it, I want to take it in, I want to soak up each post.  But for just this moment I can’t give it what it so much deserves, because I’ve got so much to do because I need to bake a cake and go to the grocery store and and and…

I want to say happy birthday to my Richard!  Maybe that’s why there were two afghans  in there?  Wow.  (You see? I can’t possibly do justice to all these subjects at once.)

And especially because.  (Wishing her amaryllises from afar.) Kay of Mason-Dixon Knitting just lost her husband after a brief illness, someone far too young to go.  (But. But. NO. *I* got better, so everybody else should too!)  I am so sorry for her loss and her children’s.

Love your dear ones.  Life is so terribly short sometimes.

And thank you all for loving me so dearly and so knitterly and so well.  I am utterly gobsmacked. Again.

So much to say…

In church today, the women’s group was having a discussion about the value of service.

One friend, probably prompted by a wedding invitation that had just arrived in the mail, brought up the memory of John T’s accident.  Of all the things people had done to rally around his family.  Of how much of a difference it had made to everybody to be actively involved in praying and in reaching out to try to make the burden easier on the parents, who were driving to Children’s Hospital in Oakland, 70 minutes each way across the worst of Bay Area traffic,  every day for three months.  (This is before they added Lucile Packard Children’s onto Stanford.)  Of how close everybody felt to everybody.

I looked around and realized how few of the people in the room had lived here long enough to carry memories of that terrible time.  John had been 12, crossing a busy street near his home one afternoon on the green (his brother was with him) and they had been hit by an older woman who was too drunk to know she’d hit them, much less that her light had been red.

His brother had a broken leg, but John…  Somehow, he was still alive, at least, but there was no medical expectation that he would ever be anything more than that again.

But he was one of the lucky few who beat the odds. He woke up from his coma after six weeks, not remembering even his family. He had to relearn everything.

They said he wouldn’t walk, they said he wouldn’t talk, but he did.  Twenty years later, he still has a slight limp and it frustrates him that he’s a little slow at times, but he’s a good, kind soul, the kind who, when you meet, you instantly know you are in the presence of a friend.

There was intense joy when he was able to go off to college, and now those invitations showing up are happily announcing his coming wedding.

The woman teaching today’s lesson, someone younger who hadn’t been here back in the day, thought she was going to change the subject now. But I raised my hand and told a part of the story the others didn’t know:

About ten or twelve years afterwards, I was stopped in the dark on that same road within a block of where John had been hit.  It was a drunk driver checkpoint, and cops were checking out each car one by one.  There was quite a backup.

I thought about it. It took me a few days. But the feeling would not let go of me, and I finally sat down and wrote a letter and put it in the mailbox to the police department in town, telling them thank you for that checkpoint and telling them  it was so important to me that they do that. I knew they got a lot of flack for those, and I wanted to be a voice of support.

And then I said why.  I ended it by saying John had beaten the odds and was in college now.

I got a letter back. It was from the then-chief of police. He told me this:

I am the cop who had to go knock on that child’s door and tell his parents what had happened to him.

And I never knew how it all came out.

Thank you.

Jack came home from Children’s Hospital today. I know because his mother rang my doorbell just before it got dark tonight to come tell me thank you for the koala, the flowers, and for being the friend and neighbor she’d needed.

I reminded her that Susan had made the  koala, and she knew; she said her husband had brought it to the hospital to cheer their son up with last night after I gave it to him.

I made the offer to bring friends from church to help with the packing.  It turns out their moving company, for insurance reasons, requires that they do all of that, but she appreciated the offer.

Her taking the time to think of me and come over, baby in arms, meant the world to me.  His smile did too, most definitely, especially after what he’d just gone through.  I just wish they weren’t moving away!

When my folks were raising us six kids, there was a day when Mom hauled my brother to the emergency room–Washington, DC is not a small town–and the receptionist looked up and smiled, “Oh hello, Mrs. Jeppson. What is it this time?”

I heard that story from Mom when I called her 26 years ago wailing, “Do kids survive childhood!” after my baby, my first, 13 months old and a determined climber, had ended up in the ER two Fridays in a row.

Mom laughed and reminded me of all the things I’d done that had helped lead up to that receptionist’s question.

But I dunno. When you call the hospital (this was today) and the person who answers recognizes your voice…

Two and a half months ago, after my surgery, they told me that some ileostomy patients eventually become allergic to the standard skin protectant they were using.  Hopefully I wouldn’t be one of them.

And I thought, my stars, have you ever met my feral immune system? It is NOT housebroken!

Two and a half months.  The fungal and yeast tests came back negative, the allergy patch flaming. That stoma paste is SO busted.  There’s an expensive alternative, and my insurance is just going to have to take it.  (I know,  I know, given January, we’ll all weep for them.)

You guys out there in the industry, creating Eakins and the like, you’d better keep researching and inventing fast, because at this rate I’m just plain hosed.

I think I’ll go wrap me up in a blanket for which I am exceedingly grateful to my friends and knit. Something complicated that will require a lot of focus.

Reader Susan to the rescue: she sent a knitted koala for the neighbors whose baby got locked in the car. Big enough to be safe for a little one, soft, cute, easy to hold and cuddly.  What Susan probably didn’t know is, remember my tiger? (He’s in this post too.)  My sister got a koala at the same time, so, koalas bring back happy childhood memories for me; I wish she could have seen the smile on my face as I opened the box up. (Wow, that came fast!)

And now Jack will have a little bit of America to take home to Ireland that is small enough to easily go in a suitcase or be tucked down the side of his carseat onboard. Cool. Thank you, Susan!