“Play with me!” Lala demanded of Isa, our dog, after Isa proved to have greater interest in tossing her toy around herself rather than returning it after Lala had thrown it.
“Do I need to get you a pork chop?” I teasingly asked her.
“No,” Lala answered with a pout. “Why don’t you play with me then?”
“Because I don’t like pork chops,” I answered.
Strange thought to round the week out, but despite the way I talk sometimes, I don’t literally expect to be chosen and guided by a beautiful Valkyrie when it’s time for me to die.
That doesn’t stop me from hoping, of course . . .
Mom’s out of the hospital, so that much is right with the world. There will, of course, be more tests and doctor visits in the future to better determine what happened and, more importantly, what needs to be done from here, but all is as well as can be for now.
So that’s good.
For the first time since this all began, I talked with Mom on the phone yesterday(*), but after dispensing with the obligatory (but welcome!) status updates on her condition, she immediately changed the subject.
“But enough about me,” she said. “How are you doing? Are you over that flu yet? I noticed you were coughing when you answered the phone . . .”
Really, Mom?
Really?
*****
(*) Mom likes to travel, and all this happened far enough away that she assured me that the best thing to do unless something changed was for me to stay put, so she kept me informed via texts. She had my brother with her since this happened near him, so this made a certain amount of sense.
Nothing new to report, but I’m not particularly worried.
Mom’s too polite to let this situation get any worse; she knows full well how much of an inconvenience that would be for me.
(And in case this needs to be spelled out, this is just another tongue-in-cheek example of my coping mechanisms at work.)
So Mom’s in the hospital due to irregular heartbeat (or atrial fibrillation if you want to get technical). This is in no way a good thing, though the answer to the question “Is this an extremely bad thing?” has been (in order) “Yes,” then “No,” and finally “Maybe.”
Got to love those definite answers, so expect me to be a bit . . . distracted for a little while longer while this saga plays out.
As a positive note, though, Mom is well enough to be snarky to the doctor, informing him that if she needed to stay in the hospital longer, she would, but she was most defintely not there for “the bed and the food.”
(And yes, this means yesterday’s thought was from a song about waiting and taking it “to the heart” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I swear I wasn’t trying to be cute with that, but that is honestly how my mind works, and I started humming that refrain as soon as I heard the news.)
(It’s a coping mechanism.)
The waiting is the hardest part.
Every day you get one more yard.
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart.
The waiting is the hardest part.
When seeking truth, it’s vital to keep in mind that truth oftentimes sounds ridiculous until examined more closely, but all but the most blatant of falsehoods tend to be carefully crafted to sound ever so plausible . . .
While the past few weeks for me have been consumed by all the trials and tribulations that come from a flu-wracked household, as the saying goes, “Worse things happen at sea every day.”
Unfortunately, sometimes those “worse things” happen on land too. While we were coughing the nights away here, a dear friend of ours lost her home, possessions . . . and cats to fire.
Kind of puts things in perspective, don’t it?
As bad as this is for you, Ms. K., please take comfort like we do in the fact that we didn’t lose you in the fire too.
In the past couple of weeks I have written and received so many rain checks that I could start my own cloud bank . . .
I seem to have reached the “feel generally okay until it’s time to sleep, then start coughing myself silly” phase of this flu, which I’m told is the winding down phase.
Yay.
As such, when my son informed me at seven this morning that it was time to get up and I wasn’t coughing, I fought a brief internal battle, let his mother continue sleeping since her coughing the night before had been worse than mine, then woke up Lala (who’s already passed the coughing phase) and asked her if she could keep an eye on him while I caught up on some rest. Sleepily she nodded her assent while I promised to let her go back to bed as soon as I got up again. “We’ll make it through this day somehow,” I assured her more by rote than conviction at this point.
“Of course we will,” she murmured, still only half-awake. “We have a 100% success rate on making it through every day of this so far, don’t we?”
Candles & Curses 