Observations

It can't be December yet. Did I tear October AND November off the calendar by mistake? I haven't even ordered a tree. Christmas decorations are still in storage, and I have yet to retrieve my cookie recipes from my recipe file. Furthermore, I haven't even asked anyone what they want for Christmas. I haven't cleared my freezer for the influx of a turkey and assorted Christmas goodies. I haven't started making lists--the multitudinous Excel spreadsheets that tell me who is getting/has gotten what and where I need to go to get it and what I need from the grocery to make boiled custard. There is not a single egg or a single box of cream cheese in my refrigerator. No extra flour or sugar. No pounds of butter. No candied fruit. I haven't plotted my shopping routes or figured out when gifts must be in the mail, or, God help me, even THOUGHT about a Christmas letter or cards or stamps...I don't even have my generic hostess gifts assembled and tied up prettily. I don't even have them bought. I am usually more prepared.

I have a precious few gifts ordered online, and there are always the 'don't-count' presents that were purchased and distributed ahead of time because they were needed and couldn't wait to be wrapped and placed under the tree. They are always sort of the 'underwear for Christmas' kind of presents. They may be necessary, and get huge points for utility, but they lack the surprise factor, or, more importantly, the 'just what I always wanted' exclamation point upon opening. Christmas morning should be exciting for both the giver and the one who receives. Right now, the only excitement being generated is in the form of suspense: will I or will I not manage to transform my house, my schedule, my plans into Christmas reality? Tick-tock.

Reining in...

Okay. I get carried away. Re-reading my last entry, I'm a bit embarrassed. While it was true, and how I felt at the time, I think I tend toward the dramatic. I'm okay. Crisis avoided. Active imagination (Omigod! What IF....?) reigned in.

Now we're down to the everyday stuff--returning to normal at the beginning of the least normal time of the year. If all continues well, and I have no reason to believe it won't, I will be back to all the usual daily annoyances and activities by mid-week. Which is wonderful, really. No more twice-daily injections and every-other-day blood-letting. Those alone would be pretty cheer-inducing. But right now, I'm working on regaining my equilibrium, one task at a time. Laundry. Clutter removal. A meal. A walk. Two trips up the stairs instead of one a day. Slow and steady, like the old tortoise.

I'm making lists, of course...but that is just me. Most of my lists never get completed: they are there just so I know what needs to be done and don't forget. Due to this brief sidelining, they are a little longer than usual, but I'll manage.

Hell Week

Hard to believe that less than a week ago, I mentioned life-or-death medical decisions. Also hard to believe that, less than a week ago, I rolled out of bed, showered, dressed and had breakfast, rummaged in the kitchen for stuff for dinner, threw in a load of laundry, hopped in the car, went shopping, stopped at the cleaners, got gas, came home and made a conscious decision NOT to clean the attic, or put mulch on the flowerbed. Hard to believe that last week I could do any or all of those things. Hard to believe that last week was normal.

This week, I'm doing nothing. I wake up and wonder if getting out of bed is worth how much it might hurt. I weigh each action against its consequences. How long can I stand up before my leg hurts? How much can I do before I am tired out? I measure my movements according to the places in between where I can sit and rest. I curse myself for not being organized and for having pants and shirts and sweaters and socks spread out over two rooms, two closets and three dressers. I feel ancient and fragile and far more helpless than I want to be. And scared. Don't forget scared.

I AM slowly returning to normalcy. This morning, my back didn't scream when I sat up. I managed a shower and got dressed without pausing between the two for a rest. I came downstairs and actually made myself a couple pieces of toast and poured a glass of orange juice. I heated up my lunch. I may make a cup of tea this afternoon. Small victories.

I've had issues with my ankle swelling up for YEARS. I got a new pair of walking shoes a week ago Sunday, and while I was trying them out at home to see if I wanted to keep them, the inside of my left ankle swelled up and started to hurt. So--with JC nagging me--I made a podiatrist appointment to see if I'd pulled something or strained something. I went in last Friday and the guy found nothing. My ankle was still swollen, but it had stopped hurting, and I wasn't too concerned. He recommended getting an MRI so we could track down the issue, and to (meanwhile) wrap the ankle in an Ace bandage to stabilize the ligaments. So I did that when I got home Friday evening.

That night, my leg was swollen to the knee and hurt..sort of like shin splints, only all around instead of just in front. I spent Saturday gimping around and sitting with the leg elevated (the swelling had not gone down overnight). Sunday was more of the same, and JC nagged me into going to an Urgent Care center after lunch. I was still thinking a strained ligament or something like that. The doctor said I should get a Doppler to rule out deep vein thrombosis, but the only place available on a Sunday was the ER. So we went to Alexandria Hospital and sat.

I got the Doppler, but not before a nurse noticed (when I got up and walked across the hall) that I had three visible knots on the back of my calf (who looks at the back of your own leg?) and (amazingly) I was picked up immediately and wheeled right in for the Doppler. When I was done, they were there with a doctor to admit me and a dose of blood thinner to inject into me. He said I'd get three more days of injections, and then coumadin for the next six months with regular blood tests to check on the dosage.

So..bottom line: it turned out to be a little worse than they thought. Initially they said I had a clot or clots essentially the length of my leg. On further looks at the Doppler stuff, they saw it was a femoral clot, which meant it was even closer to my heart, and so they needed to treat it more aggressively: TEN days of the injections and coumadin still for 6-9 months. Blood work every two days, tapering off to once a week for the duration.

Sunday and Monday: Hospital, bad food, bed rest, no sleep, general discomfort, LOTS of blood drawn, but stuck there, whether I liked it or not. Tuesday they released me with instructions on how to do the injections and saying "activities, as tolerated" I ended up not tolerating much. That night, my lower back was killing me and I was running a low grade fever--which the doctor told me when I called Wednesday morning, were the exact symptoms of intraperitoneal hematoma, which is a rare side effect of blood thinners, and I'd better come back for a CAT scan and (MORE!!!) bloodwork immediately. Oh, and if those proved positive, I could plan on being readmitted and having to have a filter surgically implanted. This was just getting better and better.

Four hours, some noxious barium drinks, a CAT scan, and several black and blue attempts at finding new veins to poke at, they told me everything was fine. The back was just my ordinary bad back (aggravated, I am sure, by the godawful hospital bed) and the fever--who knows? But...I am home, and actually feeling semi-human. I hate all this stuff, but no matter how much it hurts, it sure beats not waking up in the morning. Which apparently was a very real possibility if I had ignored the symptoms and figured (as I usually do) that it will get better or go away. I am now a card-carrying hypochondriac and will do anything that my doctor tells me to do. Bed rest? Yessir! I am there. How long?

The oddest part is that I have none of the risk factors: no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no family history of clots or strokes, no HRT, no injuries to the leg, no plane rides, no long confinement to bed, no nothing. This just happened. Out of the blue. And fast. I suppose if it hadn't been so inexplicable, I wouldn't have gone to the doctor at all..but when things happen suddenly, for no apparent reason, it's worth checking out. And fast.

And the take-home lesson from all this? Don't take it all for granted. Don't put off till tomorrow. Don't believe it can't happen to you. Pay attention when something is wrong because it's better to get a negative diagnosis than to find out too late that the "impossible" just happened. I honestly believe that JC and Sarah and Kay and all the friends who said "Go get that checked out" may have saved my life. Thank you all.

Word Problems

When I was growing up, we had math problems. Somewhere between my grade-school experience and my daughters', a distinction arose. There were math problems that consisted of simply numbers and operations...and there were word problems. The former variety were simple; all you had to do was add, subtract, multiply or divide the given numbers till you came up with an answer. The latter were a different story. (Oddly enough, they are also called 'story problems'.) These are the legendary questions that begin "A train leaves Southville at 10:45 am; a second train leaves Northville a half hour later..." These are the problems of which nightmares are made. Not only do you have to perform the right operations, but you have to figure out what the operations are, and often, what the numbers themselves are. The possibilities for error are limitless. These problems were made for the invention of 'partial credit'.

Now, I always used to enjoy the challenge of this type of problem--though I realize many of my compadres did not. I liked figuring out the puzzle of what stood for what, and how to convert real-life activity to neat numerical representations. (Imagine the thrill when I found out that calculus allowed me to figure out the volume of a doughnut, or some other fanciful shape!) I majored in chemistry, and the math involved only made that study more amazing to me.

But..back to real life and the mathematical transcription thereof. My students, when faced with this type of problem, always moaned and groaned that they hated word problems! Of course they did. They demanded more; insisted that they really understand what was going on...Horrors! My patented response was that life itself was a word problem--and it is. There is hardly ever a clear-cut equation or set of operations that will answer any of the questions that arise in day-to-day living. The problems are always messy variations of Northville and Southville, with limited time and resources available, and you've got to come up with some sort of answer, whether you understand all the parameters or not. If nothing else, word problems teach us how to set out what we know in an organized fashion--and then think about what we need to find out before we try to build a bridge from here to there.

Sometimes the Northville train ends up on a siding, or Southville's takes a detour, depending on our level of competence. Sometimes we throw up our hands in dismay, and walk away down the track. The problems vary in importance from what to have for dinner to how to deal with aging parents, from deciding where the safest place is for retirement funds to life-or-death medical decisions. Nothing is easy, but unlike the situation in your math workbook, there is usually more than one good enough answer: not perfect, not all-encompassing, not incontrovertible, but good enough, all the same. I can live with that.

Rain

Today is the second day in a row of constant rain. Perhaps it is that it coincided with turning our clocks back not too long ago, but the combination of early darkness and gray skies has served to depress what seems to be the lion's share of people I come in contact with. Unfortunately, it also seems to be a harbinger of the long winter months when the sun never seems to be as warm or bright, and the cold temperatures discourage any unnecessary outdoor activity. Bah, humbug! San Diego is looking pretty good right now.

On the poetry front, the City is working at finding a replacement for me when my term ends in March. I am still getting requests, though. Next week, I will be reading at Adoption Day at the courthouse, and I always seem to pick up a few requests along the way every time I do something like that. And, of course, Poetry Month looms in April, as well as Poem In Your Pocket Day, which is scheduled for April 29 this year. One hopes that I will have a little more lead time to prepare for that and/or help my successor to get it off the ground this year again.

But for now, even this blog is stale and lackluster. I think I used this picture before, and certainly, the sentiments are pretty tired. It is time, I think, to either pray for sun, or start laughing at the gloom. Maybe tomorrow.

Advent devotional

In a moment of weakness, I agreed again to edit the church's Advent devotional booklet. (Translation: I signed up to look up the bible readings for each day in Advent, troll for writers, nag until pieces are turned in, turn my brain inside out trying to keep the spatial arrangement of pages-in-a-booklet-format straight in my head, read and punctuate and grammar-scan and type or cut-and-paste everything into the same format, font, and arrangement, design a cover, then proofread, copy, print, fold and staple 150 copies plus a bunch of large-print versions, and then furnish the newsletter with weekly bites for those who prefer to get their devotions online...)

All right. I did temporarily take leave of my senses. I started in October, and it now looks like I may actually have it all together by the week before Advent begins. Depending on the vagaries of Xerox machines and schedules and whether or not my cover stock will jam the machine more frequently than usual. (It WILL jam it; it really is just a question of how often and how badly.)

My reward (presented by me, to me, and for me) for this effort is that I get to put my contribution wherever I want it and to write whatever I want without fear of being edited out. This year it's a poem (surprise) which I completed (Well, that's debatable. I reserve the right to mess around with it some more if I so desire...) this morning. The nice thing is...it's done. I can use it for writing group on Monday. I can use it for my Christmas cards. I can use it for the booklet. By god, I can whip it out for any or all occasions between now and the new year. Ahhhhh..... (printed below)

What Remains

After the hoopla,

the cards, and the lists and the shopping,

the anguish

of choosing gifts for all and sundry;

after the baking and parties and eggnog,

the cookies and candy and

the well-documented visits to Santa;

after tree and lights and music,

the midnight magic of a semi-darkened church

with its candles and carols and greetings;

after the perfect storm of people, paper, tape and tags

that we call Christmas

is finally done…

When the last child falls asleep,

sticky-mouthed and cranky

from too much of everything;

when the last airport shuttle has departed,

and the final car abandons the driveway;

when the guest room is empty,

and the boxes crushed,

and the last strand of ribbon

trails out of the trashcan;

when the tree lies, dry and exhausted,

at the curb for pickup,

its ornaments boxed and stored;

when normal comes back from its Christmas vacation…

What remains

is the memory of a baby

and the promise and the hope He brings.

What remains,

even when the world returns to black and white

from the red/green/sparkly snow-globe of December,

What remains,

like a warm, sweet treasure in our hearts,

even in the depths of disappointment,

discouragement, and dreary day-to-day,

What remains is this truth, this wonder, this blessing::

He is here, and dwells among us.