Not me, of course. Just something to give the page some visual interest. :)
I’m sending this now because I can’t write to you on Wednesday. I will be lying in a hospital bed, full of drugs, and being fed and looked after. Who doesn’t, in spite of the awfulness of surgery, long to drift off, wakened only to be waited on hand and foot for a little while. I am sure about pain, though. My first back surgery I came home and threw up because of the pain. My stomach is sensitive.
According to my surgeon, I have such severe scoliosis that another surgery is “a near certainty, given long enough to live.” Ha! You don’t know what to wish for, right? To die before it gets that bad, or to live and have another surgery.
Yes, me.
The spine is so malleable. You move it around, you mess with it, and it wants to shift again. You disturb it and it reacts. I wouldn’t have imagined. But here I am, eager to get on with it, eager to stop the immediate pain. I told the surgeon all I want is to be able to take long walks again and to swim next summer. He said he was “confident” that would happen.
I’ve been tooling around our retirement community with Jerry’s old walker. We are people with walkers—who would have thought? What surprises me is how little I feel stigmatized by that. I would have thought…Well, I would have thought lots of things. Under the thinking is the same old me, nothing changed except age, which matters less than I would’ve imagined. I’ll be glad to get rid of the walker, but it’s just a walker, no biggie.
I have been trying to write. I write one line a day, it seems like. I force myself to grind something out, for the good of my soul, but the truth is, all my soul is now focused on being cut open, things removed, things inserted, things being scraped out—who knows what all. I realized this morning, after trying to go on with a poem, all I can write is what you see here.
My goal in these Wobbly posts has always been to talk about the life of a writer. Okay, this is it. A writer stays observant. In some way, you relish every experience, no matter what. This is being alive. So many experiences! When I’m done with this life, I’ll be able to say, (if I could say) it was/is an amazing adventure, jam-packed with experience. When I say “amazing,” I don’t mean “happy.” A lot of it has been, a lot hasn’t, but so what? Percentage? I couldn’t say. And people I love are in precarious health at the moment, more precarious than my own.
I have the joy of having my daughter Kelly come for the surgery and for several more days. Then my son Scott, for another week. Then my step-daughter Amy for another week. And my other step-daughter Pam lives here in town. I’ve definitely got this, haven’t I? And where we live is a huge gift, I tell you. And nearly all the medical facilities, including the hospital, are within walking distance. (Probably not relevant for now, given my spine, and given the snow and 15 degrees outside.)
I’ve been studying back braces (I love to research things), not sure whether I’ll need the ghastly turtle-shell brace or something easier to deal with. It looks like after surgery I’ll need to move like a zombie for a while, no bending or twisting. Rolling out of bed. I don’t care. Let’s get on with it.