This is the post I hit send on after Richard said, “Let’s go.”  My computer froze and it didn’t post.  We just got back (love that timestamp) from taking him to the ER. He’ll be okay.

————-

The infectious diseases specialist was wonderful! The first thing she did coming in was to exclaim over my knitting in my hands and my shawl and to sigh that it’s a lost art.

Okay, hon, you just made friends right there.  I was charmed.

When I told her I had come because I needed another opinion and some reassurance because I’d gotten such conflicting information, when I said the stoma nurses had said not to change the bag more often than every two days, she immediately said, “That’s right.”

It was exactly the appointment I’d needed, and she wants me back a week or two after the antibiotics are finished.

Let’s just hope she doesn’t google, find this, and realize I’m already looking at my stash and scheming.

I was actually on the verge of deleting the draft I was writing yesterday, thinking who wants to read this stuff, when that phone rang.  It was so stunning to me that that nurse would call immediately after I’d finished the last sentence and that she would initiate it when I thought that was something I had to do, and I hadn’t, that I had to add in her call and put that post out there.

The upshot is, she found an infectious diseases specialist covered by my insurance, a woman who happens to have a particular interest in prosthetics.  There you go. I got the necessary referral arranged and Monday in I go. Perfect.

The samples arrived from the manufacturer this morning.  Not even afternoon delivery–they paid the extra for FedEx morning arrival.  Go Hollister. Go stoma nurses at Stanford. Wow.

I am feeling considerably more cheerful today about the whole thing, as one might imagine.

I’ve definitely got some thank-you knitting to get done.

TMI from a tired blogger:

The good part, I suppose, of looking up staphylococcus aureus (yowsers!) is that I’ve become even more obsessive about washing my hands. Rubbing my sleepy eyes after reading that article landed hard in the Thou Shalt Nots.

I went back to dermatology yesterday.   Then called the stoma nurse today: leaking bags waking me up in the middle of the night four times in one week on top of that still-there-staph aureus infection is kinda getting old.   Not to mention expensive–if I use too many in a month, I get to pay for the extras at about $30 retail a shot.

The stoma nurse pulled strings and has a different type of skin barrier being overnighted to me now as samples (bless her!) to try that hopefully won’t give way, and said the weeping skin won’t heal if the adhesive is being pulled off too often–keep it to every other day, no more.

The dermatologist says the skin needs an antibiotic gel applied twice a day in order to heal.

Uh, guys…

Just as I finished typing the above, the phone rang. It was a nurse from my husband’s employer, wanting to see how I’d been doing since February and could she help with anything?

So she is now going to confer with an infectious diseases specialist to see if she can get me any more information.  While I’m sitting here marveling at the out-of-the-blueness and the timing of her call. Wow.

Meantime, some knitting is still actually going on over here, slowly but surely, on my new Grafton needles handmade in–I’ve come to really love the place–Vermont.

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.

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.

Susan’s koala bear that I mentioned the other day came through the mail uncommonly fast .  But I was starting to fight a cold and hesitated to touch it or take it across the street quite yet, and gave it a few days–that, and, their cars just seemed not to be around.

The mom’s wasn’t when I took the amaryllis flower over there, either, come to think of it.

Yesterday I looked at their empty driveway and thought, did they already move back to Ireland? But it was supposed to be the end of the month!  So when the dad’s car showed up, I decided I’d better get that bear to him while I knew I could. My sniffles were better, thank goodness.

He loved it. I told him it was from a thrilled new grandma whose love was spilling over and she wanted to share it with them.  The young dad, so far from home, was touched and grateful and thought it was so cute.

And then he opened up at last and told me his son was in the hospital with kidney problems and vomiting and had had a 105 degree fever.

Oh goodness. I told him my Sam had once had a 105.2 and it was terrifying; I so hoped his son would heal quickly.  And then I went home and prayed for little Jack. I’ve been thinking since then that I need to offer to help feed the dog and to offer to gather up volunteers from church to help  do their packing for them if they need it.  Anything to support them at such a painful time.

Wow.  The timing.  Susan, your knitted koala was not only a cute toy, it became the means by which that family had neighbors present for them to care about them and their son in a moment they needed it badly.

There are no small acts of kindness. Sometimes life shows you just how powerful a little gesture really is. THANK you, Susan!!

To answer Birdy–here’s my been there done that:

My kids once got into not the food coloring but the fabric paint.  Whichever child it was never got caught. But nothing I could do could clean the green (Lorelei would be so proud) fingerpainted smears off the front of the white bathroom cabinet.

I threw all the tubes out after that–I didn’t ever use the stuff anyway and it clearly wasn’t worth the hazard to my house.  Replacing that cabinet when we remodeled was simply the only way we found to clean up that mess that worked.

So. One of Sam’s first-grade friends was moving away and gave her a box of stuff including, you guessed it, a tube of fabric paint.  In bright red.   I said no, and tossed it straight in the trash.

The trashmen somehow dropped it out of there while going about their job. I found this out when I pulled into my driveway later that day, and–picture this.  With my deafness. Inside my car. With the motor still on.  And the windows up. I HEARD that four ounce tube explode when the tire hit it!

Bright red, and splattered in tiny droplets all across the front of the house; Jackson Pollack would be so proud.

I was wearing a brand new outfit I very much liked. Oh well. I ran into the house at top speed for a wet towel, knowing I didn’t have time to change, and then scrubbed as fast as I could, hoping hard not to have to have my entire house repainted.

My outfit was toast.  Paint from the towel had swiped onto it, Cat-in-the-Hat style, but that was small potatoes to the could-have-beens.  One last drop was left on the house, dried hard before I could get to it, but it was tiny. There were a few red spots on the otherwise-berryless male holly bush.

I got off easy that time.

(Suddenly thinking, as the daughter of a modern art dealer, gee, I could set off a whole artistic trend with this post, couldn’t I?)

While I look for that one last piece of paper so I can mail the forms off…

A note from someone sparked this memory. That and the fact that one of our kids was born April 15 and I am hunting for that stray piece of paper.

My husband and I had a small infant, our first, when we were invited to a wedding reception.  His friend getting married had grown up near Richard’s grandmother, who lived in a tiny town up in the mountains above Salt Lake City.  You remember the buffalo and the fence story? When I suddenly learned how fast and how high I could jump?  Yes, that friend.  Zane.  So.

We asked Grandma if she’d be willing to take her great-grandchild for an hour or two for us; as a very new mom, it was hard to be away from my baby for any longer than that.  We’d be close by if there were a problem. She said sure.

Velcro was still a pretty new thing back then. There was a woman in the town we were living in who these days would be on Etsy, who sewed up her creations for the local baby-goods store: cotton diapers shaped to fit a baby and that closed up with velcro.

I made a point of having those diapers on Sam so that it would be easy on Grandma. No fine-fingered maneuvers for elderly hands to have to worry about, just press together and go, although, I was hoping we’d be gone a short enough time that changing the baby wouldn’t be an issue anyway. I made a point of showing Grandma the velcro and explaining it to her, just to make sure she was familiar with it. She nodded, yes, yes, got it, okay.

Or maybe not so okay.  We had a grand time at the wedding, picked up our baby for the drive home, and thanked Grandma profusely.

She seemed less than pleased.  I asked if the baby had behaved well for her?  Yes…

It wasn’t till some time later that I found out that she was not happy with us at all. How could we have left her with a baby to take care of–and no diaper pins! She’d had to search and SEARCH and search till she’d found the diaper pins she’d used on HER babies.

I found there were these huge pins going right through the thick velcro. It must have taken her quite a bit of effort to push them through it.

And as I look for that silly (why is this one necessary!) paper to keep the IRS happy, I picture my late grandmother-in-law looking and looking for those pins…

My Aunt Rosemary passed away this afternoon after a long fight with cancer.  My mother flew home last week and went to her older sister’s house right away and had a good visit with her, telling us afterwards that she was surprised at how energetic Rosemary was.

And I thought, yes.  Been there.  When you are very ill and then someone shows up who loves you, it is a very strengthening thing, both physically and emotionally.

Two days later, Rosemary had a stroke and was unable to speak, so we’re very glad Mom got that time with her when she did and the chance to create the memories she now shares of that day with two of Rosemary’s daughters.

The world will be a quieter place without Rosemary’s storytelling. She will be missed.

A few weeks ago, a customer at Purlescence asked me how I liked the afghan.

Afghan?

Apparently, uh, oops.

And then a few people on KnitTalk started mentioning it: Elizabeth had been gathering knitted squares from folks who wanted to wish me well and a speedy recovery, starting back in January when things were so very bad.  Elizabeth told me last week the result was now finally on its way.

I promised not to peek at her blog.

(Did you peek?)  That was really hard! (I didn’t, though.)

Today, the mailman went past. No box. Just like yesterday.  Just like the day before.  The UPS guy let me be disappointed just long enough, and then, tadaaah!

Wow.

And just, wow.

Sitting on top inside was a large ball of silk yarn from purlsyarnemporium.com, a lavendar pillow, and, wrapped in gray silk, a stack of cards and notes offering hopes for my return to good health and expressing a great deal of love, over and over, as I opened the envelopes.

There are ninety squares in this afghan.  Some knitters wrote; some let their stitches state plainly and clearly what they were feeling.   Some squares came with stories, some of them were the stories.

All the yarns are soft.  They match up beautifully together, and if you’ve ever tried to knit squares of different yarns to the same size, even just one knitter working alone, you know how hard it is to get the sizes to match. And yet, in Elizabeth’s hands and everybody else’s, these all came together just so.

Elizabeth’s mother did a square that I’m sorry to say the post office has yet to find.  The afghan came up one short. Elizabeth’s husband knitted his first item to make the last square. I don’t need to tell her this, but he’s a keeper.

This last photo is a shout-out to Robinfre, who’s been signing her emails with these words for all the years I’ve known her: she gave me my best laugh of the day!

And now I’m off to Purlescense for Knit Night–and where 37 of the 90 squares were knitted and contributed when I wasn’t looking.

(p.s. Ed. to add: Jasmin and Gigi with their Knitmore Girls podcast got the word out for the squares being collected at Purlescence.  Thank you!)

Russ was one of two musicians playing in the Bing Concert Series at Stanford Hospital this afternoon.  A good excuse to go back to visit. I got there a little early.

(I brought my camera but forgot to use it; this is an old picture.)  Before Russ arrived, a doctor I knew came down those long stairs with some others; I called out his name and he did a doubletake. In great excitement he dropped everything and sat down next to me and asked how things were going and exclaimed over how good I look now. He couldn’t get over it.

He’d been my hospitalist six years ago when he was very new in the job, and again in January and February.  He’d seen me very, very ill, twice. He’d never seen me well.  It totally made his day.

Then a few minutes later, after Dr. D left, again, two doctors were walking by, coming from the other direction this time and towards the stairs, and I recognized one of them.  My face lit up and I did a small wave hi as he glanced towards me.

And then I laughed to my friend Mary sitting there as he glanced back away, “He doesn’t recognize me when I’m healthy!” At that, hearing my voice, Dr. C suddenly got it. He, too, stopped, left the other doctor, came over, and wanted to know how I was doing and wanted to exclaim over how well I looked.  “You had that surgery, didn’t you?”  Well, yes.  He was one of the ones who’d listened to me saying I wanted to give the Humira time to work, that I was so sure it would.  Well, hey.  It didn’t. And look at me now.

Waiting for Russ, the violinist came over to me and said, “You look familiar.” It took me a moment, so it wasn’t till after the concert was over that I got a chance to say to him, simply, “Marguerite’s celebration of life.”

“THAT’S it!”

And all of ours too that day, I thought. All of ours too.

Then it was time to go try to visit my nurses.  They either weren’t on duty today, or I just didn’t find them.  At one nurse’s station, the woman there looked me up one side and then deliberately down the other and pronounced that no, she could not tell me what day P might be on duty for me to come back to say hi.

Well, that was interesting.  I could just imagine P’s reaction to that.

Then, since I’d been a patient in three different departments, I tried the next one.  I had much better luck there; while I was asking, the charge nurse, who’d never had direct care of me while I was in, nevertheless recognized me, came up behind me and said, “I know you!” And to the woman at the nurse’s station, “This lady wrote a book!  She knits all these lovely things!” (I was wearing a Constance shawl, tied in front.)

Which is how she got first choice of ten lace scarves, only, not the bright green, it was promised to P. She took the Casbah dark teal in great delight; “For ME?!”  You betcha.  I wasn’t going to tell her that the lady downstairs kind of sealed it for her: you’re glad I’m here, I’m glad I have something that it turns out I’d knit just for you.  Thank you for making my day and remembering me.  Good for you.

She told me where to find C, the one nurse I already knitted for while I was still in the hospital. C was with a patient; I waited at the station awhile, then went over and stood outside the patient’s room, telling myself I didn’t want to get in the way while getting more in the way.

C glanced out the door. She saw me.  She did a doubletake as I smiled a yes, you! at her.  Her eyes got big and she came out and we threw our arms around each other.

I almost said, Wait. You’re supposed to be about a foot taller. I was always looking way up at you!  We were both laughing for sheer joy.

She said it was so wonderful when patients come back to say hi.  I imagine so: it validates everything she, as a nurse, goes through day by day.  It would remind someone working in the blood, sweat, and tears of a hospital why they do what they do.

To make people well again. To help them become whole.

It was good to be back.

(Taken through the skylight.)

I haven’t mentioned the outcome before over here, but back in September–you know, back when the economy seemed okay, back when we didn’t have thousands in medical bills and co-pays, etc–we decided to go for an old and very large dream of ours: we signed the papers. We were going solar.  Bigtime.  (Now if the car companies would only fall in line so we can charge a car from the house.  Can’t afford a Tesla…)

And then we had to wait for our panels to be manufactured.  Others who had tax breaks elsewhere with a January 1 deadline got theirs ahead of us, and we were okay with that.  But finally we got word that our panels were ready to be delivered and installed.

…The week I got home after nearly three weeks in the hospital with my total-colectomy surgery.  With all those skylights, dead center in one bathroom and above the sink of the other (but with a strategic door at least). Oh joy. Hi guys.

The owner of the company, who knew, told each of his workers they had to knock on the door and ask permission each day before doing anything or making any noise up there, that they were not to interfere in my recovering.  I was quite surprised.  And each day, they got told thank you for asking, and hey, go right ahead.  Work progressed nicely.  (I wanted it OVER with!)

It was worth every moment.

My cousin Dan and his family who came over last night–turns out they got the same panels a year ahead of ours.   Cool.

Now, this being California in a drought, if only we could do the same produce-your-own with water.  Suppose we could build a pipeline and help out those folks in Fargo?

When my oldest was in high school, a dozen years or so ago, there was a young band and orchestra teacher, Theron Pritchett, in his second year there.  His enthusiasm for music and his love for his students was such that his classroom quickly became the place to be, and the number of kids signing up soared.

Then he found out he had cancer. When he said they’d taken a 15-lb tumor out of his stomach, everybody went, Where?  I mean, the guy was tall and thin to begin with, but afterward it was like his shirt could blow right through him in the wind.  Fifteen pounds!

But it was apparently self-contained, they were very sure they’d gotten it all, and he was relieved to be back at work with his kids.  Mine absolutely adored him.  He was a good one.

I was sitting in my daughter’s next concert at school when an unexpected mental image came to me. I’d been spinning some 90’s (Bradford count) merino.  Now,  I didn’t know at the time how rare it was to even find a wool that fine to spin.  Where I got it no longer has it.  It was seriously soft stuff–the micron count was finer than cashmere. I had a baby blanket in mind to make with it, but as I sat watching Theron conduct and the kids play up on that stage, I pictured a different project entirely and I absolutely knew that what that wool was for was for making him an afghan to wish him well with. To try to convey how important he was to all the parents in the high school music community as well as the kids.

I did a fair bit more spinning, two-ply skein after two-ply skein.  I wished fiercely that I knew how to knit lace.  Had it been a few years in the future…  I could picture exactly how I could have used lace leaf patterns and a faggoting stitch for a trunk to knit the idea of a Tree of Life, but at the time, it was simply beyond me.  That fervent wish later helped propel me to sit down, books and needles in hand, and start to make myself finally work through and learn what I’d needed to know then.  My first attempt at one repeat of Dutch Elm Leaves, in Theron’s memory, took me over an hour to do across 15 stitches with two mistakes I couldn’t figure out how to fix.

And look at me now.  But this story isn’t about me.

So, instead, for his afghan, I sketched out what I had in mind and knit up that tree in a combination of knit and purl stitches gansey style.  When I got done, you could see it if you saw it in light that let the purl stitches shadow across just a bit; otherwise, it was just a white blanket, but very nice.

I don’t have a picture of it. What I really wish is that I had a picture of Theron with it.  He loved it and was fairly blown away; and then the thoroughly delightful exclamation of disbelief I knew was coming: “You SPUN the YARN?!!”

Memory says that band enrollment tripled and that that was when the school hired a second teacher to help handle the load.  Who was Sue.  Whom I got to see last night at the concert.

Shortly after she arrived at the school, I spun and knitted her a scarf–triangle and in angora, if I remember correctly.

Theron was there when I gave it to her.  She was totally thrilled and stunned.  I got to watch the grin on his face as she exclaimed the exact same words he had, “You SPUN the YARN?!!”  He told her about his afghan in great delight.

Then the day word came he’d relapsed; it was hard.  And yet I want to say: my daughter marveled to me at the time at how the kids across the high school came together, how they stopped judging each other the way teenagers do but simply saw each other as fellow travelers.  Life is short; treat each other well.  Theron had a positive influence far beyond what he knew as the kids reached out to each other in their grief.

Sue was one of the small group of friends who played a deeply moving rendition of  “Amazing Grace” at his funeral.

Where I met Theron’s partner and introduced myself as the one who’d knit his afghan. He told me Theron had asked for it and had kept it on the bed with him his last week.  I loved that.  I loved thinking that the love I had tried to knit into it had comforted him.  That comforted me.

I am so glad I got to see Sue last night.  I am so glad we went!

I should write about this tomorrow when it’s not so late and I’m more coherent, but… I didn’t think I was up to going to hear the Peninsula Symphony play tonight, so I tried to give away the tickets Don had given me.  Didn’t work.  I figured well, then, maybe that means there’s a reason I should go other than the fact that I would certainly enjoy the music.  And Mom, who’s a musician, wanted to go, and I wanted to take good care of her like she’s been taking good care of me.  So hey.  She and I went.

My kids had a band teacher in high school they adored, and it turns out she plays in that symphony.   I managed to snag her afterwards and catch up a little; it was so good to see her.  It’s been way too long. I am so glad I got to go and that nobody else accepted my offer of those tickets!

Which is kind of a different take on it than earlier today, isn’t it?  Good people make everything worthwhile.

And Don? Thank you for those. I pictured Amalie applauding and wished you could have heard it all too.  There was a tuba concerto and a bassoon concerto, and the players were clearly having the time of their lives; bravo!