Sunday, July 13, 2014

Okay is Really Very Good



It’s been about six months.  I hate to put the bad voodoo on us but it’s been about six months since we have seen the inside of a Providence Hospital room.  

For us, for the chronically ill, this is a big thing.  Not doing the hospital for any length of time is freeing, it’s cause for celebration.

I know, some of you have never seen the inside of a hospital and the only way you would is if death was nigh, but we are too frequent flyers and dance the happy dance when we can string consecutive months of hospital abstinence together.

It takes about six months of good health for me to start to breath deep again, to sort of relax; to let the anxiety meter drop out of the red zone.   Personally, when things are good I quit looking at every blood pressure reading taken and I quit watching Marty’s every yawn, every twitch, and every shiver.  I step off the knife’s edge.

That doesn’t mean I’m not on guard duty.  I still worry about Marty being fatigued and if that’s some sort of indicator.  My ears still perk up to a cough or a choke or a complaint of pain.  I’m just not hyper about….okay….I’m just not AS hyper about it.

Marty was last in the hospital at the end of January for a bad bladder infection.  After that we started a prophylactic dose of a narrow spectrum antibiotic often used for bladder infections.  Since we started that daily regimen we have had nothing but clean pee, can I have an amen for clean pee.

We did make one late evening trip to the ER for what turned out to be an upper respiratory infection we could manage from the house with the assistance of Great and Wise and his fab crew.  We caught it early, hit it with additional big time antibiotics and there you go….home recovery, no hospital stay.

We do the hospital dance pretty well, the fact that you can adapt to almost anything if you do it enough or see it as an occasional necessity is a testament to human adaptation.  Hospitals are not normal places.   

Prior to Marty’s first stroke hospital stays were for monumental kind of illnesses and strictly reserved for the very very sick or injured.  I guess that still applies because when we go to the hospital Marty is pretty sick. 

You’re missing my point…..mostly because I’m meandering.  The point being…Marty is doing really well.  She seems to feel good, she does get tired pretty easy but I think that’s because it’s hard to continually recover and live life when you have had a traumatic brain injury.  She needs really good rest and sleep and sometimes that doesn’t happen.

When Marty is doing well, when she is feeling good, when she laughs a lot, when she makes the occasionally sarcastic remark, life seems very normal, even, dare I say, good.  Am I allowed to feel good in this really weird existence?  Do I have to feel guilty when I do?  Naw…

We were about to get out and run some errands the other day and I caught myself feeling good about our life.  It was quiet, we were going to run normal errands, save the fact that I had to move Marty from her wheelchair to our car, it felt like what you are supposed to feel like when you have retired and don’t have to worry about stuff.  

It was a moment of contentment followed by the kind of mundane errands that life requires of normal people.   I’m okay with mundane.

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