Yesterday was such a sudden and steep dive downwards healthwise that it threw me; there’s always this fear of the Next Big Flare, which might not be treatable the next time, and I was living it. Michelle texted me every 15 minutes: drink! Two sips! She got me through the day.

And then I woke up this morning and I did not barf. My belly ached, but it wasn’t childbirthy now.  I managed eventually to eat something. It helped, and hope breathed a grateful relief. Thank you all for your prayers and for Thinking Good Thoughts.

And then I got up, I could actually get up! and I read my emails.

Don is gone. Home to be with his beloved Amalie again, five years after losing her. But–Don is gone from us.

Our elderly friend ran into me at the grocery store shortly after she passed, fifteen years after I’d last seen him. Their son Cliff had not yet moved back in to take care of him and Don was alone. I gave him my blog address, he became a regular here, and I encouraged him to start his own blog and some of you kept him in good company with your comments and caring, and I will forever be grateful for that.

He passed two days after coming home from the hospital, and the day in between, I called to see how he was doing. Cliff told him who was on the phone and asked if he was up to speaking with me, and Don didn’t hear; “Who?”

I heard that one word and I heard the effort that went into saying it and knew in my bones it was the last thing I would hear from him. It was. Cliff apologized, but I have been at that edge where simply breathing is all you can do–but I had Crohn’s, not cancer.

Goodbye, dear friend, and the rest of you? We’re all going to have to step up on the bad puns to wish him well on his way forward. I’m, I’m, just not coming up with any quite yet. I’m sure I’ll make up for it later.

I took Michelle to a physical therapy appointment today. Her car is not finished being fixed even yet, and she herself is far from it, although there has been some progress and that is a very good thing. (The speeder was doing over a hundred, the second car saw what was coming and swerved into where Michelle was, Michelle did 360s at 65 mph and while doing so was hit head-on by one of those two as they flipped down the freeway, landing upside down. The driver of the second car is a survivor, too.)

I pulled out my knitting. It was going to be awhile.

An older woman arrived to check in. The room was spacious and grandly lit by two-story windows behind where I sat, the waiting room an atrium. It gave me a chance to observe quietly at a bit of a distance: I loved her long braid that she could almost sit on; my father’s mother’s hair was like that, I’m told. I loved the patience and the wisdom in her face–I wanted to be like that when I grew up, and I imagined her as being one of those argyle-sock knitters of the ’50’s who never stopped loving working with yarn. The ones the hippies learned from.

She glanced my way when she was done at the desk, started to sit down, and I looked up again with a smile as she gave it up and got back up and approached me, just too curious. What WAS I making? (She didn’t quite say, too big for a sleeve, too small for a sweater in the round unless it was baby size, too big even for a hat.)

A cowl, says I, popping it over my head to show her, suddenly glad that I’d used circs that were a bit big for the number of stitches I’d started with–couldn’t have given that little demo with a sixteen-incher, that’s for sure.

Ah yes, of course. And she told me of the senior knitting group she’d gotten started. Most there only wanted to do squares, she said wistfully for what they were missing out on, but, she smiled, you could do a lot with squares.

Yes! I mentioned the Linus Project blanket that had been gifted to my friend’s son after he fell 30 feet from a ski lift–he’s fine now, I hastened to add–and how gobsmacked I was that some knitter somewhere had knitted the very pattern and colorway that I had wanted to knit that family an afghan in. When they needed that comfort, it was there for them.

She took a long breath of deep satisfaction from that. Every stitch matters, she said.

Every stitch is love, I added.

Yes! said she.

And with that she sat down and picked up a magazine. (And I thought, ah, so you’ll be using the pool therapy. I wouldn’t risk  good wool anywhere near chlorine either, yes.)

According to the Washington Post, the drug companies average a 19.9% return on revenue, and the problem isn’t the strength of the insurers (who make 2.2%), it’s that they’re weak: they can’t band together to negotiate lower prices. So.

Another year, another first time in January at the pharmacy. Same guy. He’s the manager now.

He looked at me with a wry smile after entering my insurance info and the amount rang up. “You want to know what it’s going to be this time?”

“Like last year when we met the year’s deductible in one day here?”

He handed me the slip and let me see for myself. Not quite three thousand. Fun times. Having no choice, I handed him my credit card.

I now know what a zip gun is, and yes the kid who brought two weapons to school is in custody. I’ll let my teenage niece tell it, and I quote:

“2 incredibly ironic things about today:
1. after living in the middle east for four years, my high school in the US is where they find a “potential explosive device”
2. the most traumatic part of today was not the bomb threat at my high school but watching downton abbey”

Kid’s got spunk, that’s for sure.

And we all lived happily after.

(Blood test results so far: normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. Whoops, not that one, that one, nor that one, and we still have the Stanford test to go, but I think the things they were most worried about they aren’t now. I think.)

Me: What should I write about today?

Him: (after spending hours updating the blog.) “Knitting.” (Accompanied by vigorous head nodding.)

Me to you all: I knitted today.

And I tried to figure out why on earth I never saw that upper sign before. The owner bought this shop in 1974.

There’s a story in here somewhere and I’m dying to know.

I have an appointment with a new doctor tomorrow. He had my oldest as a patient when she was in her late teens/early twenties.

Which is why (being a mom and all) I now have a printout tucked away in my bag waiting to show off with: her doctoral thesis in molecular immunology, with my thanks for his efforts towards her good health.

Went to my lupus group today and it was a small one–just four of us.

In a long conference room at El Camino Hospital that utterly swallows sound, with that few people, it was easy to ask them to repeat and speak up when I needed them to; I wasn’t depriving any new patients of desperately needed information or of their chance to vent by taking up too much of our allotted time, I didn’t have to worry about impatience, it was just old friends coming together again. One woman in particular I have never seen so relaxed, laughing. We reminisced. We caught up on each other and marveled at how some things had turned out okay after all (Joe and the furnace spewing carbon monoxide, I’m looking at you–thank you all over again.)

And I looked around and thought, we’re survivors. And this is why we come: to show the young patients they will get through it. We did. We do. So will they.

But today we could just simply be, and be together.

It was just what I needed.

I’ve only ever seen her a few times. Her mother is a member of our church and so today she wheeled her in.

I was surprised to see a touch of gray in the daughter’s hair. It happens, though, doesn’t it.

We threw our arms around each other, the daughter and I. Neither of us asked the other anything like, now what is your name again? I held the mother’s hand a moment; she was lucid, which has not always been so, radiant, even.

It isn’t easy to be responsible for a parent, and from a young age at that, no matter how sweet the personality of both (and they are.)

And I found myself deeply glad I had done that knitting years ago: to do my small part in caring, too, to try to let the daughter know forever that she was not alone.

—————

On a separate note: Bashie just passed away at 98, it was announced today. The woman whose father was a rider for the Pony Express after Abraham Lincoln asked Brigham Young for riders and the last, as far as we know, surviving child of a Civil War soldier.

See how innocent it looks. Not a soupcon of suspicion. (Chicken noodle soup on the side for his foggybraining head cold.)

BPA-free package, the Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Soup box said. The flap was solid across, no indented dots, just, Squeeze in at the four corners to open. Odd.

My hands just plain weren’t big enough and clearly weren’t strong enough. I would just have gone and gotten the scissors and been done with it but curiosity got the better of me–was that really the right way to open such a thing? Thwarted, I didn’t see how it made sense.

My friend Lynda was talking about words that the English language needs to have.

He didn’t get up and come into the kitchen, he just helpfully took the package from my hands. He didn’t read the instructions, he just queried me and I helpfully parroted again what the thing said, so, okay: and my 6’8″ husband with his great big hands gave that little box a good short hard squish suddenly with the bottoms of both palms in the very instant that I knew too late to beg him to forget what I said and not, just, not.

English fails for when you’re suddenly helpless, crying, laughing, quite unable to stand upright, utterly dissolved–but at the same time also very sorry that you’re totally losing it in front of someone who’s paying for the source of that mirth and incurred it for your own sake and you know it though he would never say it and ohmygoodness.

Mentos and coke. Snowblowers hitting a row of jack o’lanterns. Think redhead with highlights, spaghetti sauce around toddlers, the shirt, the pants, the hair, the chair, the desk, the floor: nailed’em all.

Bless him, he thought it was funny, too, though honestly perhaps not quite so much. (Where do you want me to put these, dear? Washing machine, right? Yes please, I answered, trying to be meek and thanking him for helping me. There have been random snorts of laughter all evening since. Geysers! I’m sorry, honest I am. Butbutbutbut. !!)

I think that Amazon gift certificate from my brother might need to go to a new keyboard, maybe for insurance’s sake while we can still get the ergonomic ones cheap, but so far his still seems to be working after all.

After he got cleaned up he was even willing to eat some of that soup.  What fell back into the box was still left.

I opened the door at about 8 pm in the dark.

“I’m not selling anything, I’m not here about anything political or religious.”

I’m a Mormon. The guy had no idea why I laughed.

“And your neighbor Dave over there and Sarah over in the cul-de-sac said that you wouldn’t have any dogs barking or biting to worry about or anything and that you were cool, so, I’m here to tell you about some fundraising I’m doing for” (names a cause that sounds good) “and I’m here from Chicago and helping by getting credits for” (selling these magazines but claiming it was all for donations’ sake.)

I smiled and said I was very familiar with (his spiel, basically) that we hear it several times a year. But I wasn’t interested in buying any magazines.

But I hadn’t closed the door yet, and I did let him show me a page listing some of those magazines, so he continued in great pretended earnestness, and when I apologized for the No Solicitors sign he told me he had a problem with reading, he was so sorry (and yet you want me to write down all my financial information and name and address that you say you wouldn’t be able to read.)

Etc.

What he didn’t know is that he completely gave himself away in the second sentence, not that I needed him to. He was counting on neighbors not knowing neighbors–but we do, we have a much-celebrated annual block party that has expanded over the years as people in the next block and the next have asked to be included; we all wear name tags. There is no Sarah and there is no Dave, those were as fake as the rest of the guy’s come-on.

Nor did that voice sound like it was from Chicago.

Maybe I was as fake as he was by not saying any of that but I can definitely live with that.

My husband, hearing from the next room, complimented me afterwards on how nice I was as I finally got him to go away (was he checking to see who was home and who was still away on vacation?) But then, it was cold out there and what I really wanted to do was just go find the guy a much warmer sweater than that thin one he had on.

But not so much so as I’d knit him one, y’know?

I got to see my hawk yesterday–twice. The second time, he flew in to just outside the window and perched awhile, choosing to be eye-to-eye for several minutes, a wild thing taking my measure. It made me want to measure up. He had a meal waiting below the window, but first things first.

And I saw him Sunday after the kids and grandkids left, right on cue.

As if he knew.

Christmas Eve more blood tests were run and the day after Christmas, they told me.

Who knew that feeling energetic was a symptom of disease? Fine, can I keep it? It can crash the heart? Oh. Okay. I remember when George HW Bush, his wife Barbara, and their dog Millie were all diagnosed with this at about the same time and some thought the change in him as they tweaked the replacement hormone levels after killing off his out-of-control thyroid possibly cost him reelection.

I know they often name diseases after the person who got the press for describing them first, but I just have to say as an editorial comment on the word: Graves’ is a really, really laughably-stupidly-unhelpful thing to call what you’re going to tell patients they have, don’tcha think?

Autoimmune diseases! Get them here! Collect them all!

The digger sweater: Parker gave it an appreciative Oh, that’s cool! look and would not take his eyes off it for a moment there, but, it being clothing and he being three, did not offer to try it on. But he was very glad that it existed and that it was his.

At the time they rang the doorbell, I had woven in all the ends and was sewing up the second side as fast as I could. About twenty seconds of work and tadaaah!

I had the first sleeve on the needles but it was claimed as it came, a vest instead, which makes sense for their climate. Parker and I threw great bunches of colorful yarn confetti into the air to celebrate, again and again, all those snipped-off ends.

My daughter-in-law swooned over that sweater, just couldn’t get over it. She is every knitter’s dream recipient, I tell you, just the best.

Toys: the $12 Costco dinosaur in the toy basket for playing with at Gramma and Grampa’s was maybe a little too big right now: Parker picked the monster up with no complaints but just hauled it to the bathroom and firmly shut the door on it. Banished. He did, however, find the ukulule that was the survivor of the four $10 instruments we bought our kids back when they were little, a tad dusty, a string loose that Grampa quickly reattached for him and there you go. His daddy was playing with the guitar; he’d found himself a Parker-sized version.

And then they were off to Kim’s grandparents’ for dinner.

I need to start figuring out what Hudson’s sweater is going to look like.

HE’S HOME!!!!!! They were going to keep him till the middle of the grandsons’ visit, a whole ‘nother five days, and yesterday when he said, So I’m going home tomorrow, right? the nurses were sympathetic but the doctors gave that idea a yeah right look.

So I was not at all expecting the call at 12:15 this afternoon saying they were sending him home and he was getting ready. Then immediately came the message from Phyllis and Lee saying they wanted to go visit him.

–Well actually….

I had been wishing hard that I didn’t have to make that long walk in the sun at the highest-UV part of the day, solstice or no solstice, and there they immediately were on the phone with no idea I needed them, offering well then, let us help you out with that. And so they drove me to the curb and waited. Circled when they had to and came back and waited patiently some more.

It’s always a long wait. After awhile I went to the nurses’ station and asked with a grin if I could bum a wheelchair and wheel him out myself? (One is never allowed to walk out on one’s own, an employee must wheel you out.) They laughed and called down again and ten minutes later there you go. Took an hour and a half for me once, so ten minutes is practically the speed of light.

And then just to top it off, when we got home Phyl and Lee asked a few questions and then went into our garage (brave people) and wrestled the fake tree out of there and the wires to the darn thing and set it all up for us, upright and lights on and there you go.

I was expecting to have a grand total in the decorating department of a Christmas quilt on the floor with post office boxes on top. By myself. Whoopdedoo. And then head over to visit him at Stanford.

He looks great. A friend was throwing a get-together tonight and he wanted to go and so after a few hours’ lying down here to rest up for it he had a great time, and Nina and Rod were there and offered Christmas dinner if we would throw in the oven time since theirs wasn’t working. Hey! Twist our arms! It will be a great day well spent.

And, bless the poor old guy, now I don’t have to be in the same room for hours every day with a patient on the other side of the curtain with pneumonia and a 102.5 degree fever–in my autoimmunity, that was really really really not a good place to be, but since it was my husband on our side of the curtain there was no question but that I was to be there. I confess I would have been there more hours had it not been for that.

The new hospital whose foundations they are now working on will all be private rooms to stop germs from spreading between patients so easily.  They can’t build it fast enough.

My Richard is home. I wore a Christmas sweater a dear friend gave me years ago, and the good Jewish wife who’d been there day after day too with who knows how much more to go whose elderly husband lay in that other bed and whom I fervently wished could be taking him home too wished me a heartfelt Merry Christmas as we went out that door free.

Aaaaand… The flip side of yesterday’s post.

The phone rang early in the morning confirming that today was going to be the day.

Since when? That’s not what we planned or heard.

And so the alarm went off for us night owls at 4:37 am and we got to Stanford just early enough for Richard to get to the ambulatory surgery check-in on time–but the parking!

Hah. The long walk I thought I’d have to take from the garage to meet back up with him again after dropping him off? With the new hospital going up (I thought it was going to be on the other side of the place, y’know, over where the monster crane is, right?) that garage has been torn down and nothing has replaced it yet but I didn’t know that yet in the dark. I have no idea what I would have done if he hadn’t told me to just go home and go back to bed and he would call me when it was over.

Then they didn’t send him home. No big deal, but still.

On a lighter note, don’t miss the piano playing along with passersby according to whatever they were doing.

If you’re local and you need a piano tuned, you need this guy. He’s the best.

And then later this afternoon…

I don’t remember what I saw him for; just the reaction years ago of this family practitioner, the most gentle and caring doctor, asking, Is there anything else going on?

I could only laugh. He’d seen me previously as the on-call when my children had been babies running around his legs in the examining room, so he did know my face, but not that I’d since been diagnosed with lupus. And then asthma. And then nine years after the first, Crohn’s.

His shoulders fell, his pen went quiet on the page, he looked at me steadily as he took that in a moment, knowing I still had children at home to raise at the time.  A bit of wonderment at the relatively-healthy-looking woman of good cheer in front of him, then, “You’ve got a full plate.” As simple and direct a summing-up as I have ever heard.

It was one of those moments where someone says the right thing at the right time in the right way and makes everything okay. I have never forgotten it.

Michelle was having post-accident problems that warranted being seen again to make sure there wasn’t a break, so we took her to the clinic. The nurse took her back to where they did x-rays, they talked about physical therapy; we waited. I knitted. Made good progress on the thing, too, to where you could actually see what the lace was going to be when it grew up.

She came out with one of those clunky black strapped-on one-size-doesn’t-fit-most thingummies on her foot, and while she was filling us in on the visit, turned out he was again the on-call doctor covering for today and he came out to greet us and I wonder whether to see if we her parents were who he thought we would be? But he had one more thing to mention re her knee, so he came and good, we hadn’t left yet.

He’s Richard’s regular doctor, he’d seen me back in February and remembered the days, and there we three were, here still, together, supporting each other…and he was beyond delighted, a moment again of stopping and taking it all in–in joy this time. I could just see the wow, she’s not a baby anymore! twinkling in his eyes.

To life!