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.

Six-month retina post-op for me.

The clinic has a white board in every department listing the doctors and how many minutes behind they are, if any. Usually they’re not by much.

But this was a first: someone came through the waiting area announcing that Dr. R was 37 minutes behind–and while holding a large tray full of goodies and asking, Did anyone need water or a snack?

I had never seen this before. I don’t know if those were crackers, cookies, peanuts, or what, but I had just sipped from my own water bottle (I love my five-year-old one) so I smiled a thank you and passed up the chance. But I loved loved loved that Dr. R was making sure those patients out there were okay. That is so him.I looked around the room and remembered the days of gestational diabetes and hypoglycemia and having to carefully monitor intervals and intakes to keep my blood pressure and blood sugar up.

Our president is illegally throwing bombs at the country his grandparents grew up in. He is responding with, in the words of Alex Pretti, Are you okay? While actively making sure we were.

An old favorite deserves a re-mention on this date. Per the late, great comic artist Richard Thompson:

March comes in on clumsy feet

Kicks the trashcans down the street

Spills some garbage on the lawn

Blows the rest to hellandgone

Knocks the branches off the trees

Gives the power lines a squeeze,

And then March leaves and as it goes

The sun comes out. Then it snows.

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.

Part of me is quite sorry–any tree gone is a loss. Most of me is relieved. It was an invasive planted who knows by whom in the wrong spot. The deed is done.

Turns out the core of the trunk was in very bad shape, crumbling to nothing, with the damage radiating out to the edges in a few places. We may well have dodged more than we knew.

The baby peach tree is going to do great there.

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.

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.

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.

I had questions.

Who designs a new hospital such that there’s a big window in the room but the patient in the bed cannot see out it? His view was entirely blocked by the curving wall of the bathroom on the side of the room where the head of the bed goes. Maybe to entice the patient to start to be ambulatory? Okay, but when they most need to see the sky, anything at all beyond the whirrs and the beeps and the medical gear? They can’t. Only the light reflected off the wall over on that side. The mind boggles.

Maybe they were trying to protect from shattering glass in an earthquake? That’s the only thing that made sense. But Stanford is more seismic-safe in their new building and they didn’t do that. (The new seismic code went into effect a few years ago and a lot of hospital buildings got replaced.)

My view at home with the coming storm putting an exclamation point on the colors.

I had another question I wasn’t ever about to ask: how does one aspire to, I mean, cut off toes when one grows up? What would pull someone to that?

The podiatrist came in and, having a little time today, out of the blue chatted a bit about himself.

He’d thought of going to medical school but being a pilot sounded pretty cool, too, and he was leaning that way. Meantime he was working at one of those big outdoor outfitters, fitting people to their new ski boots–and he was good at it. Really good at it.

A podiatrist came in with his son and complimented his skills. That led to the doctor saying, You know–you really should be a podiatrist. Podiatry needs you.

He believed in the young guy, his enthusiasm rubbed off on him, he (the good now-doctor reminiscing chuckled) pulled some strings and got him in. And so the kid did go to medical school so that he could become a podiatrist, too, and here he was.

And I thought gratefully, one random stranger taking the personal interest and the time for someone else’s child changed so many lives.

He took off the bandaging a nurse had changed not an hour before to inspect how it had done overnight. It frankly looked a lot better than I thought it would: how does one make sense of half a big toe and the missing one next to it? How does the mind look at that and think yes, yes, that makes sense.

It doesn’t but in those skilled hands it had become okay, and I understood now how Richard had so trusted the guy to make the right decision and then to do the thing right. That foot looked the healthiest I’d seen it since August by far. It was such a relief to have all that infection we’d fought and fought against in a slowly losing agonizing battle for half an hour every night month after month simply–gone.

Two canceled trips to see grandkids last year.

There will be healing, and then we can start to plan our life the way we envision it again. It’s been awhile.

I’m going to put the p.s. up here because maybe it belongs there: typing all this out got me to realize that part of the problem could have been how immigrant nurses have been treated in this country the last few months and thus how many are no longer there. But on with the story.

—-

Come 11:30 for the 1:00, they said.

Well that’s a nuisance. (It was rather late in the day for the don’t-eat-don’t-drink.)

You know hospitals always do that, I answered.

People came. Patients got taken back. People left. People came back to pick up their family member being wheeled out. We sat there.

1:00 became 2:00. Finally they took him back and the nurse said she’d come get me as soon as he was all set up.

Right, I knew the drill, he gets into the hospital gown and they do all the set up, you kiss each other goodbye, you go back out to the waiting room and they call you when he comes to.

They didn’t do any of that.

The receptionist who’d checked us in left for the day minutes after we arrived and left her station unmanned.

Pretty soon it was just me sitting alone in that room, knitting away. A few hours in, I put down the knitting and picked up my book. You know how some books, you finish them and immediately start them right over because they’re that good? This emphatically will not be one of them. Oh well.

One guy came in and looked around and around, staring at the desk: why was nobody there? His distress was obvious so I spoke up, to his relief. But they called me! he said. Then they’ll be wheeling her out soon, I assured him. About ten minutes later that same nurse did.

And again assured me Richard would be soon. I said to her, it has been five hours since I’ve seen a bathroom and where on earth is one???

Oh, it’s right over there! (Ie between the inner and outer doors to outside. You don’t often see double sets of doors in California because we don’t have terrible weather but that building did. Hello? Could we please please add some signs?) Okay, I told her, thanks!

And then nothing.

The lights in the room suddenly dimmed and stayed dimmed. Oh thanks.

I needed to refill my water bottle and was glad I could now. I looked at those inner doors: I did not trust them. But I had to have that water and there was no other source.

It was after 5:00 and yes, I got locked out of the building. But, but, but, this is where I have to be for them to come get me to go be with my husband!

I stood there outside the glass doors thinking what on earth am I supposed to do, when at last two orderlies pushing carts walked past at the far side of the room. I tapped on the window and explained my plight. They stopped (bless them), tracked down permission and opened the door for me and disappeared quickly.

Five and a half hours. The second half entirely alone other than that brief encounter. There wasn’t even bad cafeteria food to retreat to: I had been told twice that I’d be called for any time now and this was a small building away from the main hospital building. (They seem to be connected in back these days with all the new construction.)

All I can figure is, they had told Richard yesterday that they would call and he had explained that texting is a better way to reach me because I can’t hear. But texting isn’t in their habit pattern and they simply forgot–but either way, I certainly wasn’t allowed to go through those patient doors by myself to go looking for him. I, meantime, was busy stomping down all kinds of thoughts like did he have a heart attack and they’re too busy trying to save his life to go get me.

When at long last I got their attention and got escorted back there, I sent a note to our Mormon bishop, who had wanted to know how things were going. The answer to that medically was, it was a worst-case scenario of what had been but a best-case scenario of what could have happened if they didn’t stop it now.

But I told him I had never encountered a situation like today’s.

He sympathized–and, it turns out, he was sure his friend the CEO of that hospital would want to hear the story.

What a day.

You don’t interrupt someone in the middle of a doctor appointment–but it had been three hours. Text.

A few minutes later: Four plans. Complicated. Tell you when I get home.

And then didn’t show.

Are you in the hospital.

Didn’t answer.

I hoped that was because he was driving and on his way.

I was putting his cold late dinner in the fridge and was about to call a friend to give her a heads-up that I might need to beg a ride to the hospital when the door opened and there he was. And yes a hospital is one of the plans–but not today and, turns out, not that one. Sitting around waiting for the first one to say no, they’re in a billing dispute with your provider’s corporate overlord is how everyone wanted to spend their time today. The second one said no problem, you’re in.

But at last we know what comes next. We can do this.

So our car has PG’s eyes now, I told him.

A friend of PG’s had had cataract surgery and had had the lens implants deliberately not match: one was set for seeing near, one for far. He told PG it was great. PG told his doctor that’s what he wanted to do, too.

We are designed with two eyes for a reason. Sabotaging binaural vision because you don’t want to wear glasses seemed a really bad idea to the doctor, who tried hard to talk him out of it. But failed.

Out of sheer curiosity I asked my own cataract surgeon about it and his take was basically you’d have the whole rest of your life to regret that in.

So. The Prius.

There’s the window switch and there’s the set of them for setting the outside mirrors. I got the left hand mirror where I wanted it, went to change the one on the right–

–and the thing fell down inside the door. Visible, at least, but useless.

One eyeball view for me, one for Richard. Good thing we have shoulders we can look over.

Tomorrow when the mechanic sees my note I can find out if that’s a new one on him.

I knew nothing of his background when we first met, and I’m glad of that; I got to know him a little with no preconceptions. His Scottish last name matched my great-grandmother’s and we figured we were cousins way back there somewhere.

Gradually, some of his stories seemed farfetched enough that I wasn’t sure I believed them.

Today I found out how true the one I questioned the most was. I was not expecting that.

His close friend from high school played a flamenco tune that James had taught him to play on his guitar all those years ago, and talked about James’s stage name and how he’d come by it and the travels and lessons and performances.

So that was real. That wasn’t the imaginings of a hard-core homeless man who once threw a major tantrum at me when I emailed him of an apartment opening for those who wanted to come off the street. I’m sure he saw it as me looking down on him, but it was pure naivet’e. He was where he felt comfortable being. In the end, just before his kidneys finished giving out, he did in fact accept moving into a place built to help people like him. That was his offer of comfort to the rest of us.

James was a gifted artist of a gardener. He was hired by someone I vaguely knew who was building a mansion up in the hills who described James as working on his own time and in his own way and you can’t rush him; all you can do is know that it will be glorious when he’s done. Glorious is a direct quote.

During a slow patch for him, I tried to hire him to come copper-spray my peaches against leaf curl disease.

I thought of him this morning as I did that task myself.

I walked into the church this afternoon; I’d met his mom, but surely this was his sister next to her. It was.

While their mom was talking to someone else, I told his sister–who made sure afterwards that Mom heard it, too–that James had refused to allow me to pay him that day when he was done. Said it was his gift to G_d today, that he likes to pick someone to just serve the Lord to and that was that.

Knowing his strong faith, I said, But the Bible says wo to those who oppress the hireling in their wages!

Didn’t budge him. He had done it for love. Always would. Please let him know next year when to come. (I confess I did not. I like to pay people for their work.)

And so I had knit him a soft wool blue cabled hat in thanks. James gasped at it: “I will treasure it the rest of my life!”

His sister said, “Oh, THAT’s where…” and trailed off. She’d wondered…

I did not dare ask how rare it was for her late brother to own and to keep something nice.

I knew the acidity of that dish was a bad idea.

Never mind what I was going to write before the result so rudely interrupted me. (At least this is rare.) And granted mine was from Crohn’s, not cancer.

But if you’re reading this and you’ve been putting it off but you know you should, go schedule a colonoscopy. Yeah I know they’re fun. Trust me. Do it.