I figured out how to shower with the cast-arm resting on top of my head. I still can't wash my left upper arm. Too close to the hand to reach it. I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through the next month with a four pound cast on my right arm, although if I've learned one thing from my life's trials, it's that when you start thinking "how am I going to make it" that's the turning point. The next day you wake up and it's been a month already. I suppose, like trying to watch an electron, becoming conscious of this revelation will change it.
When I woke up from the surgery, I knew my hand had to be on my chest, but it felt as if it were thrown over my head. The sensation stayed with me through recovery. At one point my blood pressure started to nosedive and the nurse started freaking out. She apparently hadn't been told about my blood sugar. A glass of apple juice and I bounced right back. I'm an impatient patient. I wanted to be out of there by 930, after walking in at 5 am. Next thing I knew, it was noon and I still hadn't made it from the gurney to the recliner. I knew the coffee would suck (I've been in that chair before) and the muffin would be a mushy one in a vending machine bag, but I wanted them. They taste like success.
I wonder sometimes why I started having all these joint problems in the last 3 years. Knees, elbow, shoulder-- even vertebrae, disks slipping around like wet flipflops at high tide. I tell my friends my warranty expired. I know, it started around the time Jesse got sick. But the first knee, first slipped disk, started long before. It just didn't seem to be a pattern till now. I could still do most yoga moves then. Now I'm stuck doing Pilates in bed. It's a challenge, and probably not as good as the mat, but bed is where I am most of the time. This weekend friends got me up and out, hubby took me to dinner, gf took me dancing, so I got a little sense of how atrophied I am. Good thing they were there, because they can run interference for my arm, and cut my meat for me. A few hours on my feet seems so small, and it wears me out, but it helps me feel just maybe I can find my way back to work soon. And now that this surgery is out of the way, I can start the long slow road to Kilimanjaro.
Yesterday I was napping with my back to the door (still recovering from dancing). It's one of the few positions I can handle, because the cast won't let me lie just any old way. I woke up because I felt someone behind me, leaning in near my left ear, and heard her whisper to me in an old woman's voice, "I just wanted to thank you for your relationship with Sa..." I couldn't tell if she said Sandra or Sarah. I turned around and there was no one there. And I was not asleep, and not on anything stronger than Aleve. What. The. Hell.
The Hollow Woman
5 years ago
