I lucked out.

Thursday night, quite against my better judgment but knowing that medically I must keep my fluid intake up, I tucked a small water bottle into my oversized purse cum knitting bag to take to Knit Night. Usually I just hand-carry it to the car and stick it in a cup holder but I was juggling things and trying to simplify.

I forgot to do the cupholder part. I completely forgot it was in there, period.

It’s a great little water bottle, prettier than the photo gives it credit for, very well designed, very water tight. (The upper brass-colored part is reflecting the room on the right side but in reality the form flows smoothly and simply.) My daughter was paying for it as a souvenir of her business trip to Japan last year just as an earthquake struck, but the cash register apparently kept right on working as the place shook hard around her. She had quite the story to tell.

It is if you have the lid on right, anyway.

I drove my hubby to work Friday morning. The Prius runs remotely via the fob, no need to put a key in, just throw the purse in the back seat and out of his way and go.

When I pulled back into my driveway, though, I fumbled to find that keyring so as to open my front door.

Wait. The keys were–wet?

And yet the fob had done its job and my car had not become stranded. (You can take it apart and have an actual key if you have to, if you can get it to separate; my hands have found it difficult enough before to have had to ask for help.)

As it dawned on me, I was going, wait, where did that… oh no…

I pulled out my Iphone and it was covered in water droplets. I wiped it carefully, I mean I hoped it was carefully is there a more right or more wrong way to do this, off on my clothes, standing there outside in the sun, stunned at the enormity of what I had done to myself.

It worked peachy fine. No we would not be stuck with not only replacing it but losing our grandfathered cheaper family plan that Verizon is itching to ditch.

I unlocked the house, got in, took everything out of my purse and held it over the sink and poured the water out. I examined the leather on the outside of the purse, y’know, that beautiful new-this-Christmas one that has the knitted cable pattern embossed into the leather, the one I’m so inordinately proud of, that I can never replace….

It was dry! The lining had held it all in, and the lid on that bottle must have just then on that trip been knocked loose or the not-tight bottle turned sideways–either that or I was somehow *really* lucky if the lining had held it in like that all night and without the electronics being submerged enough to be ruined.

And I had taken my $150 hearing aid’s bluetooth unit out to charge in the afternoon before Knit Night and had utterly forgotten to put it back in and had grumbled at myself over that.

Everything was fine. The handknit fingerpuppets were dripping wet. Y’know, I think I can handle that…

That could have been an incredibly expensive mistake then and on into the future and yet all it was was the small nuisance of stuffing a succession of towels in and out of there to help my purse dry, with mental thanks in my mother’s direction for teaching us kids from when we were little how to take good care of wet leather shoes so they wouldn’t shrink nor get too stretched out as they dried.

And so I spent yesterday with that box to mail looking forward so much to Janet’s mom knowing I wanted to be there for her and her daughter the best I knew how. I wanted to give that sense of being loved to the whole wide world.

Because even though it was all such a little thing in a life, still, there was definitely this unshakeable feeling that someone up there knew and cared and was looking out for me.

Among the UCSF questions: “In the last twelve months, have you had trouble getting your insurance to cover a medication that was prescribed because of your lupus?”

“Yes, I have,” I started to answer, “actually, including right now”–then I stopped myself with, “Oh wait–they must have gotten it through finally, because I’m scheduled to have that shot tomorrow.”

So today was the day.

And against all this season’s odds it rained, a long and at times hard, glorious, much-needed bout of rain, briefly down to a drizzle so I decided it was a good time to head out the door for the clinic. It was why I decided to go to the post office with the hat after, though, rather than before, a little reluctant to leave a warm dry house with quite enough leeway time. (Rain is always cold here. Always. It was a revelation to me when we moved to northern California that the very concept of a soothing warm summer rain simply did not exist in this part of the country.)

And I wanted to give myself enough time for backups on the road: people here too often do not drive well when there’s actual weather, not to mention it would be when the high schoolers would be getting out as I went by and they definitely do not have much driving experience in such conditions.

But all went well.

So I had waiting time. Then the shot. Then twenty minutes’ more of a wait to make sure there was no reaction to it.

Which means I sat and knit, the desperately-needed rain in view from the second-story windows and people coming and going to their appointments around me, each one getting a smile and a nod if they wanted to see it.

Because throughout all that, as I added green stitch to green stitch in a lace pattern my hands knew so well I barely needed to look at it, the happy thought of that little box waiting expectantly in my car and the love I got to hear in a daughter’s voice for her mother and my own anticipation of her mother, fighting for her life, cheering her on, her opening that box and the card and the note and hearing that someone out there loves that she raised her daughter so well, loves them both, whoever they are….

Maybe the baby alpaca that was growing in my hands as I sat would in its own time go to someone someone around me right then knew. We are all connected somewhere. It made me happy for them, too.

And I caught their eyes and silently wished them well on their way into their doctors’ offices, whatever may have brought them there, or on their way home.

A joyful Easter Sunday–and a birthday dinner at Michelle’s, shared with our niece and nephew.

And…

For about 15 years now I’ve been in a lupus study at UCSF, the current focus being longterm SLE patient outcomes. There is an annual phone call of an hour to an hour and a half.

That call was scheduled for Friday, and we got through most of it–but the woman’s voice was giving out and you can’t talk softly to my hearing. She apologized that it had been an intense week and sorry about her voice and could we finish the memory testing part next week? Maybe Thursday?

Yes, sure, of course.

Then, with some hesitation, she told me why she was so stressed: her mother had just been diagnosed as being terminal.

Oh honey!

Which is why I found the ever-so-slightly-grayish-ice-blue Venezia merino/silk in my stash, very soft, and got right to it: the sheen of the morning light across the San Francisco fog for where the daughter lives, warmth and love to the both of them, whoever they may be.

A chemo cap. A little bit of knitting. It’s nothing and it’s everything.

After all that rejoicing over all those things I was hearing for the first time since I was twelve after getting the latest-and-greatest hearing aids a year ago, all of that was starting to quietly…fade. I was loathe to admit it. I was still occasionally picking up sounds I didn’t used to but I was often having a hard time hearing ordinary conversations again. It was quite discouraging.

When I got them I was used to soft earmolds, and the new ones, given that they had electronics in the molds as well as the main part, were hard. My connective tissue disease responds to pressure as pain and the hard ones soon hurt, so John-the-audiologist had to make the molds shorter–which meant I heard less and they fed back more but at least it left me knowing that someday they could make them longer in a material I could tolerate better and I would hear even better come the day. Something to look forward to.

But not if my hearing itself was going down again. And feedback can cause that.

Two weeks ago it finally dawned on me that this past year of finally, finally, slowly getting my weight back (due to the funky thyroid) from my big Crohn’s flare of ’09–maybe that was the problem with the hearing. One changes weight in the face and the ear canals first when the pounds go up or down and it changes how sound is transmitted. It was worth a shot. Ten pounds? John totally confirmed the possibility. So I went in.

This time I’m used to using the harder-material earmolds and this time I know to put them in and leave them alone, no fiddling, do nothing to irritate.

John did the impressions, he sent them off, the new molds came back and we chose to try for longer again. Yay! I went back to get them last Thursday glad they’d come just in time to be able to hear Parker and Hudson so much better…

…And the right one broke in the technician’s hand as she was affixing it, to her great surprise.

It was okay, though. I meant I went off to see the grandkids with one ear much louder, hearing all kinds of new things again, and the other ear not–giving me extra time to adjust to the EVERYTHING IS SO LOUD changes.

I got to hear Hudson saying Yawrrr at twelve months after the pirate book reading. How perfect is that!

There is still some small chance the replaced earmold will come tomorrow, before I fly off to a memorial concert in honor of my late Uncle David. (Just me this trip.) Either way: it is enough.

And what got me to sit down and write all this. I was watering my blueberry bushes this evening when a seagull passed at a goodly height overhead, its cry faint in the distance.

I knew it instantly. And almost as instantly I realized that I only recognized the sound from my childhood. After all these years I was finally gull-ible again. Wow. And it’s going to get even better.

One other thing. Being too cheap to pay Turbotax the $25 for submitting the state taxes over the ‘net, I went to the post office today. There is a place where the Bayshore parkland lies just past the next road, where, as I sat at my light, there were two lanes of onramps to the side and nine lanes of freeway behind, cars, cars, cars, and tucked between the ramps and me was an oasis of a triangled culvert.

Green and lush in a way few places are in the drought we’ve been in and with a bit of water at the bottom. Overflow from the marsh starting at the other side of the road ahead, it seemed.

The most magnificently colorful duck dove in there, too fast to be sure what type.

And I looked across at the wetlands ahead and the mountains away on the other side of the Bay and this one little wildlife-sustaining spot of thick and thriving and green despite all that hedged it in and thought, Nature adores a backroom.

My lupus group meets once a month and I’ve already missed two months this year. But somehow, today felt different and for the past few days I’ve felt like I must not brush this one off–I must go.

Actually, I was going to take a friend to the airport this morning, hoping it wouldn’t make me late (and that, once late, I wouldn’t go oh forget it); but another friend stepped forward to offer to do the ferrying without even knowing it was being a problem for me and suddenly my path to that meeting was wide open.

There is no such thing as a small act of kindness.

Due to all kinds of unusual circumstances all playing out on one day, after the first of the two hours we were scheduled for there were only three of us there. I shut the door to the loud voices in the hospital hallway that were drowning ours out, which gave us our privacy.

And one woman in that room had needed to be heard. One does not open up one’s inner soul in a noisy crowd, but two friends, she decided she would.

The rest of that story would be hers to tell alone and not mine.  It was one of those moments where one could look back years later at how the pieces fell into place for her sake and how it all began at last to come out okay.

I fervently pray.

I gave her a hug and she was grateful. I was, too.

“You’re doing it backwards.”

This was yesterday evening. I caught my breath a moment, mindful of the zero-UV to too-dark-to-work sliver of time I had to work in and told the guy, “I’m doing the best I can.”

There was a very dead large bush at the corner of my older neighbor’s yard right by the edge of my front walkway, ugly and a fire hazard; she had asked her gardener to take it out and he apparently had looked at that thing and thought, you have got to be kidding.

Or whatever, but, he didn’t touch it, so when I happened to ask her if I could try to tackle it she said oh please do thank you.

It was amazing how big that stack of branches was getting as I clippered away: near as long as me and getting pretty darn tall too and I was, well, bushed. I’d gotten all the smaller ones and the majority of the middling ones. Some of those, though…

And that is when the guy across the street walked over.

“You should start with the bottom!” he added to his first statement.

I was trying to read his face–he couldn’t be serious.

He was, though, just not in the way I thought. He walked back to his own driveway and chatted with his teenage son a moment. When I heard the plan, I said, Wait, she told me she wanted it out but let me just make sure she knows what we’re doing, (yeah, kinda late there, hon, but I knew this was way more than she was expecting) and I ran and knocked on her door.

The kid had one question for me: it really was dead, right?

Oh yeah, had been for some time.

Good.

Don’t do anything that will damage your truck, it’s not worth it!

He laughed. Not a problem.

Back in my own driveway stepping well and clear as he and his friend put a thick yellow strap around the lower part of the multiply-trunked-above-ground deadwood. Made quite the little tree. They were going to back the truck up onto the grass–nah, got another length of that strapping, don’t have to, here you go–and they linked the two and then the end of the second to the hitch on the truck. Fire’er up!

REVVV *thud*!

And that was that and it was done. We all left it all there where it lay.

I knew today was the day her gardener came and I quietly offered to pay him to haul my pile and that short log away; he laughed and waved me away, the hard work already taken care of, and when he was done you couldn’t even find the hole in the ground to see where it had come from.

It looks amazingly better to have that big dead bristly thing gone. But the surprise of the teamwork was the best part.

I came home from a trip to the post office this afternoon to find a raven standing in the spot the stump had been dragged to. Staring at where that bush had been. Transfixed. Not able to replace its missing landmark by the power of its mind. Poe thing.

Something nibbled on a one-inch peach, found it terrible, and went for a second. Time for the clamshells.

——–

I met her boss briefly a year ago. We had just flown back from my mother-in-law’s funeral and my daughter was on a two-day bereavement leave, but there was something she needed at her office and I drove down there with her–it was a time of needing to simply be together as a family as much as possible before ordinary life took over again. Such a strange thing that would feel like.

He came downstairs along with another co-worker and, as I quickly put my knitting aside and rose to my feet, they introduced themselves to me and warmly offered their condolences. I came away glad she worked for them.

Today  found me driving her back to that office: the boss was transferring to another country (home, for him) and there was to be a surprise going-away party for him and she didn’t quite feel up to that drive and back.

I said I would sit in the car and quietly knit for however long, no hurries. I cracked a back window–it’s the warmest day we’ve had in awhile–and she looked askance at that and said we can’t have you exposed to the sun like that. (Re the lupus.) Come on in the lobby. He won’t see you and he wouldn’t recognize you if he did.

Oh, ask I, intrigued, does he have face blindness? (Too? Like me?) But how many women does he know with gray hair and a cane and, this is the big one, *knitting*? There? I didn’t want to give away the surprise.

She wasn’t about to diagnose the guy but she assured me it would be fine and said he would never recognize nor even see me and so I cranked the window back up and found myself inside on a nice leather seat near the door where you could see people coming down the stairs or in the front door or out from the hallway off to the left–same chair as last time.

But I was prepared. I didn’t just have my knitting. I had my Time magazine. So I could go, y’know, incognito like that. Only, as I pulled it out of my purse, apparently I had just recycled this week’s (the truck came today, it’s gone) and kept last week’s because I have a great visual memory like that. Checking the cover? Oh. Darn. I flipped through a few pages, thought oh well, put it back and pulled out my knitting. A skein of Jacques Cousteau from Madeline Tosh, the one I bought at the MadTosh shop in Ft. Worth when we went to visit with my mother-in-law for the last time, actually; it was my souvenir skein from that trip.

Wait. I think that’s? But no, he didn’t look my way at all. Huh. The idea that I would recognize someone a year later after only seeing their face once was very highly unlikely anyway, so, okay, not.

Michelle showed up awhile later having clearly had a great time. And laughing, because….

…Hi, Michelle, I saw your mom downstairs!

He’d gone out the front doors for just a moment, forgotten his badge, had had to go to the security guy a few feet away from me and ask permission to go back in to work–the guy had chuckled and waved him on in, he was hardly a stranger–and there I was, right in my spot, I think with even the same color yarn as last time, knitting away.

Totally busted.

So how was your day? he asked.

Well, I finished the purple cowl I was working on on our trip down yesterday–I’d had about an inch on it before we left, it was about 2/3 done when we got home, and today I finished the knitting waiting at the lab;  I rinsed it and now it’s blocking.

“I never saw a purple cowl, I never hope to…” he teased me with an impish grin that finishing that line might get him in trouble and skipped over to, “But I can tell you anyhowl…”

Re the lab. I guess the hyper- and hypo- thyroid autoantibodies evened themselves out: my counts that they affect are back in the normal range. No surgery and no thyroid meds needed at this time.

I was in the middle of answering an email about Coopernicus when there he was, swooping in, same time of day.

That branch is a favorite king-of-the-mountain spot for feathered and furred because it offers a commanding view of the birdfeeder and the yard, but it is dead and is on our must-go list, I’m sorry to say. Too dry. Too flammable.

And then I noticed for the first time that there in front of the dense limbs and leaves it also provided room for him to open those big wings wide unimpeded to lift off at full speed if need be. Interesting. (Those branches that look big and in the way in front of him in the second picture are actually the little twigs around the birdfeeder.)

He watched over me for 28 minutes, occasionally telling the world about it, occasionally looking around at every leaf from his side–while the rest of the bird kingdom held its breath unseen.

He left and there was a sudden explosion of life. A junco tumbled out of the olive tree, pulling up to a safe finish just at the ground. Towhees jockeyed for suet, a chickadee to the feeder, then a dove arrived below at the all-clear. Briefly.

Another grand scurry and all became still again.

And I went off to pick up my husband from work so I could tell him what the doctor said about the latest on the Graves results: autoantibodies that cause hypothyroidism and autoantibodies that cause hyperthyroidism. For the lucky patients, they balance out. Me, well, no.  Several months of testing to come.

And I utterly forgot to give the doctor the hat in my purse that I’d knitted for his wife. Which answers my question as to whether it was the right project for her: no. Not there yet. But then knitting some more while having a spare for the give-away bag is not exactly a punishment.

Woken up by sharp chest pain at 3 am. More but less intense several other times later in the morning.The cardiologist told me it didn’t go on long enough for it to be my heart–and a phone call was as close as I was able to get to actually seeing him. Just more lupus hit’n’run stuff no biggy.

The Crohn’s, it snarls.

He told me to go see my family practitioner and I said okay and with that good intention took my fever straight back to bed for most of the day. But I did, at one point, quite deliberately get up and order that last cone of aqua dk silk from Colourmart, a color I like but had not tried yet. Just to make a declaration to myself and to look forward to knitting it. This is just a blip.

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.)

Feathers fluffed against the chill, relaxed.

Yet again debating whether to say anything quite yet. It was December 16th that I was given the first heads-up that something was off–but possibly not much. You’d better go. (Make up your mind.)

I waited this afternoon for the time to hurry up and finally finally get here, trying to knit my way to calm, finding the last hours to be the longest.

I glanced up and to my surprise, there just outside was Coopernicus perched on the big pot my extra-dwarf cherry tree is planted in, facing me.

I finished a 400+ stitch row, a small bright growing bird’s nest in my hands in the cheering color (thank you Lisa Souza) of a bright summer sky, and looked up again.

There he remained, steady and firm, watching over me. It was very moving. He didn’t mind my taking his picture, whereas in years earlier he would have objected to a black object being raised near my head and pointing at him. I moved around the room, trying to get past the effects of the double-paned glass. His face turned to follow my gaze.

I smiled and went back to my project, determined to make visible progress.

Another row. More photos.

Another row. And at that I let him be. I emailed a friend to say how grateful I was that he’d been there easily an hour now in raptor attentiveness–and hitting send, I looked up, and at the suddenly empty space wished I’d seen him go but was glad for what was.

And with that I went off to meet the doctor who did a bone marrow biopsy on my daughter ten or twelve years ago.

He asked after her. He was thrilled at being handed that printout of her dissertation. I was thrilled at seeing the Johns Hopkins plaque on his wall–how perfect was that?

He was a dear. Did this have anything to do with the Graves’ diagnosis last week, I asked him? No. But so this is probably nothing, right?

He looked me steadily and gently with a long-practiced eye at this sort of thing and answered, We do not know that yet.

More tests were done. Another will have to be done at the hospital. And soon we will have answers.

And then, coming out of there, I ran into a favorite teacher all my kids had in high school and seeing each other in that department, there was no need to dance around reality. I was in the testing phase. She, not so much. It was a relief to her to be able to ask after each of my kids, to celebrate with me where they’ve gone on in their lives since she’s seen them, to hear me brag to the nurse who showed to take her back to her appointment that my kids got to have her as their teacher. Just the best.

She got a break from it all in those moments. And I knew the words to come for me might be much gentler than the ones familiar to her by now. But we shall see.

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.

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.

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!