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.
No comments:
Post a Comment