Me before last weekend: overwhelmed, but still swimming.
Me after last weekend: a whole lot more overwhelmed, but still swimming. I'd tell you if I weren't. Promise.
I wrote that last post two days before the Breck Mountain Enduro, another race in the mountain bike series I signed up for so I couldn't back out of biking therapy. I believe I even said, and I quote, "I'll do it if it kills me."
After I wrote it but before posting it, my friend and I went up and made a few more loops on the short stages so I could get a good feel for the trail, and on race day, I felt really, honestly confident. My downhill and technical skills generally somewhat compensate for my lack of leg strength, and an enduro format meant only the downhill portions were timed. So it was all good, right?
It was so much fun. I asked Bobby if I could borrow his bike, heavier than mine with better geometry for stability on fast descents, with a longer wheel base and longer suspension, but he was reluctant to let me ride it simply because he didn't want to spend any money to replace anything on it if I broke it. (Remember this little tidbit for later.) So on the morning of the race, I woke up, spent a little time searching for the only pads I own (elbow, purchased after my last big crash that removed a large amount of forearm skin), couldn't find them, so I loaded up my bike and went to the race.
About halfway through my second stage, I suddenly felt The Switch. The Switch is what I call that moment when something happens mentally that welds me to my bike and nothing else matters. Maybe endorphins and adrenaline kick in. Maybe I finally stop thinking about anything except riding. Maybe I've been on my bike long enough to feel like it is an extension of my body. Whatever it is, when The Switch kicks in, I suddenly look up, relax, let off my brakes, and just watch the trail come, lean into the corners, and feel as if the whole world is smiling. The Switch is the reason I bike.
Which is how I felt as I started the last downhill portion. I rode around a few features that were too technical for me, took a wooden bridge drop with a fairly gentle dismount, came around the corner feeling strong and confident, and decided in a split second I would ride the last bridge drop, with a steep, short dismount. I had ridden it on preride laps and had frightened myself a little bit because in order to keep from going over the handlebars, I had to be behind my seat enough my butt had to be almost rubbing my back wheel. I had dropped my seat a few inches at the top (I haven't spent $300 on a fancy hydraulic seat post that allows adjustments on the fly like almost every other mountain biker). I rode up on the bridge, dropped my front wheel off the lip, may not have jerked it up enough, may not have thrown my weight far enough back to get it over my rear wheel, and the next thing I knew, I was sliding, face down in the dust and gravel. I slid to a stop, sat up, and felt an odd weight hanging off my face. Reaching up, my hand came away covered in blood and I felt something squishy hanging from my face. I stuck my tongue out and it encountered air, not lip as it was accustomed to. The sickening realization dawned on me that the gummy worm like thing hanging over my bottom lip was, in fact, part of my top lip. I actually looked down to see if the rest of it was lying on the ground, realized my bike was lying in the trail where the next rider would not see it if they came flying over the next feature, forced myself to my feet and drunkenly make my way to it, dragging it out of the trail, then sat down to wait for help from the next rider, feeling bad because they would almost certainly stop to help me and forfeit their race as well. I felt for my phone in my jersey pocket and realized it was gone.
Sure enough, the next rider rounded the corner, not taking the bridge feature as I had, hit her brakes to ask if I was okay, then sped down to tell medical that I needed help. At the same time, a mystery person appeared. I thought it was the rider, having ditched her bike and walked back to me, but have since pieced together that they were two separate people. She asked if she could help me and I said, as clearly as I could without an upper lip, that I had lost my phone and needed her to call for help. She did, then stayed with me until the medics hiked up the hill to me. In the meantime, I asked if she could see my phone in the trail, she started looking around for it, and I got up and wobbled toward the landing zone as well. I eventually spotted two square dust-colored objects under the dust in the trail, my phone and mini tool kit, grabbed them, and weaved back to my spot under a tree, then wiped off my phone and turned on the camera. The poor mystery angel saw me doing it and gasped a bit. "No! Don't look at yourself!" I switched my camera to front facing because apparently I'm a rebel, gravel and blood falling out of my mouth, and told her, "It's alright. I know I tore my lip off. I already know I've got a lot of reconstructive surgery ahead of me." I looked, and realized the weight hanging off my face wasn't just my lip, but my cheek as well. My bottom lip and chin also hung lower than usual, torn from my gums and jaw. Mystery Angel nervously said something like, "They should be here soon." I stood up again, adrenaline still coursing through me, making sitting still impossible, and announced/mumbled, "Maybe I should start walking down to meet them." At this point, Mystery Angel suddenly grew some authority. "You need to SIT DOWN." Her sudden conviction cut through the other noise, so I obediently plopped back down to wait.
Medics arrived and I stood up to meet them, grabbing my bike. Someone offered to walk it down for me, but I was reluctant to let go of it. I somehow felt like once I let go of it I would not be a mountain biker again for a really long time, so I said I needed it for stability. They took it anyway, telling me they could provide better stability. I answered all their questions, couldn't remember what day it was, then launched into a long explanation of how this is not unusual for me but it was definitely sometime after June 20.
And then adrenaline started to ebb and things got blurry. We walked. At one point we had to navigate down an extremely steep, loose portion of trail and the medic supporting me lost her footing and almost landed on her butt, but still managed to keep me upright. And we walked some more. Radios chattered, a meeting place was agreed upon, we walked through some aspen branches I had to duck to avoid them slapping my face, then we emerged into a driveway where an ambulance and firetruck awaited. At this point, all I could think of was lying back on the gurney and sleeping, but once I was lying on it, I tried to close my eyes and realized I was still buzzing and couldn't relax. It was quick, though, we were moving almost immediately.
As they were loading me up, I kept thinking about them doing the same with my pale, bruised, weak toddler, and how I wanted, more than anything, for it to not be happening. And since it obviously was happening, to have it be me. In some really weird corner of my brain, this happy bell kept going off. "It's me this time! It isn't him! He's fine, and I finally get to be the one the train hits. Thank goodness it's me." It was honestly, and I know this is so far beyond messed up I haven't even tried to process it yet, a weird euphoria. Like this huge relief that finally, finally, I get to pay my dues and this is finally the massive inconvenience we've known was coming and we are so long overdue for. I know. I know. Some day I'll have to face this insane psychotic survivor's guilt and expectation of the other shoe dropping that I feel over Daniel's whole thing and accept that things just are, and are not based entirely on whether or not one deserves them or is due for them. But for my readers not entirely aware of the premium placed on guilt, self recrimination, and the acceptance of less than ideal situations as exactly what one deserves in certain rural, ultra-conservative religious organizations, just know that there is precedent in my childhood and young adulthood for such weirdness to be very deeply rooted. Tossing off a home sewn bonnet doesn't always mean tossing off all the weighty weirdness one has had sewn into ones mind while one was young.
The EMT asked the usual concussion related questions. I told him I honestly didn't think I was concussed, that at no point did I remember my head taking an impact, just my face. I told him my neck hurt, but not vertebrae, it just felt like the muscles at the base of my skull were starting to stiffen up. He told me I was being surprisingly calm, to which I laughed a little and told him this wasn't the first bad thing that had ever happened to me. I then added that my son had been diagnosed with cancer, and after you hear news like that, anything less is just... not a huge deal. He asked about the type, then casually added, "Me, too." Which was how he came to tell me about his own brain tumor and lack of treatment options, while I tried to properly convey, through lipless mumbling, how freaking much life can suck sometimes.
At which point he shoved a needle into my wrist and gave me morphine to shut me up. As it was kicking in, I realized I had still not called Bobby to tell him his day had just careened off the rails, so I called him to tell him what I had done, carefully choosing my words by their lack of lip-requiring vowels to keep him from freaking out. "So, I crashed my vike and messed uff my face", I told him, then braced for the reaction I knew was coming. Because I know him and his second reaction is generally loving concern, but his first reaction is to disect, disseminate, assign responsibility and pinpoint the point at which things began to go wrong.
"Can you meet me at St. Anthony's ER? They're taking me there by ambulance."
"You did WHAT? Why? What did you do? This is the last thing we need. I cant believe you did that. What the hell? I thought you were more careful than that."
(Feeling like a scolded child) "Well, I went over the handlebars and screwed up my face. I'm sorry."
"Are you okay?" (Bless him, I love that predictable man so much.)
"Yeah, I'm just mad I did it."
"Well, I have to go pick up trash and get some work done so I can take some time off. Unless you need me to come right now."
I wanted him with me more than anything, someone solid and familiar because everything was pain and weirdness, but I lied.
"No, I'm fine. I want you with me, but I'll be fine."
And then I shut up, because morphine, until we got to the hospital and I had to sit up and move, at which point morphine kicked my butt and I was pretty sure I was going to vomit, which wasn't an ideal outcome considering that the only exit route for said vomit was through my mouth. But I held my breath until we got inside, and anti nausea meds fixed it. Somebody manly took my jersey and bra off and put a gown and heart leads on, trying to be deferential until I told him I wasn't shy, and somebody else put a collar on me, which was a special kind of awful because my sternum was skinned and I couldn't breathe through my nose, clogged with dirt and blood, so I had to push my chin down against the collar so I could keep my mouth open to breathe, which pushed the bottom of it into the bloodies on my chest. Surprisingly soon, they announced Bobby was there, so I prepared them that he might pass out because he isn't the greatest with blood, and as his feet appeared under the curtain, I was so relieved to have him with me.
Except it wasn't him. It was a brother of a girl about my age down the hall. He stopped inside the door, his eyes big and frozen on my face like a deer in the headlights, and I mumbled, "I think you have the wrong room." As soon as it talked, he seemed to definitely realize he wasn't in the right room, and scurried away. Poor guy.
They bumped my transport for a more serious one, so I had to wait for another ambulance, during which time Bobby finally showed up, found his way to the right room, got a peek under the gauze on my face (that the nurse put there when she helped me to the bathroom after the poor random stranger saw me "so you won't scare any children") and didn't faint. I wanted him to never, ever leave me, but common sense won, so I sent him to arrange getting my car home from Breck, pack a suitcase for us and another for the kids, take kids to my friend Ginta's house, and meet me in Denver. I thought it would take about an hour to be transported to Denver. It took three hours with weekend traffic. I spent it in a morphine haze, observing that the morphine didn't do much for the actual pain but it did make me sleepy enough I could temporarily check out in spite of it.
At St. Anthony's in Lakewood, the trauma surgeon gave me a nerve block in my face and dug some of the gravel out, but soon realized the futility of that endeavor since the nerve block was only effective for part of the injury, and decided to finish in the OR under general anesthetic. Bobby showed up, hung around, then left to get some food or coffee or something, then came back. I got clindamycin and dilaudid at the same time and nausea hit hard, so more zofran as well. Finally we got word the OR had been needed worse by someone else, so my suite on the sixth floor was ready for me. OR was rebooked for 11:40, so we settled in to wait. They pushed me to pre-op, only to hear, around midnight, that the one surgeon and anesthesiologist on staff at night had been, again, needed worse in a different surgery. Several hours later, the same news. And then the lights blinked off, then on again as the generator took over. It's all a bit fuzzy, but I remember shaking and holding my breath for what seemed like hours from the pain during an endless wait while computers rebooted and orders for pain meds were resubmitted, and at the worst possible moment, with all the pain meds worn off, the pre op nurses also delivered the news that as long as the power was provided by generator, there would be no surgery. And then I went ahead and lost my crap. I started to shake and cry uncontrollably, apologizing, saying I understood that I wasn't top priority and that was a good thing, it meant I wasn't dying, but this had happened already at noon and I had been lying with bloody gravel and my lips hanging inside my mouth for sixteen hours already, and I just. wanted. it. to. stop. They had refused to take the gauze off my face, covering the wound, even though I said it felt as though it was starting to stick for hours already. Nobody had actually seen my face since ER intake late that afternoon. They had been just dribbling more saline over it, not believing it was sticking since it was wet with saline, but my meltdown finally convinced them to try, and as I suspected, they peeled back the massive pile of gauze pads, saw the mess underneath, and suddenly got a whole lot more accommodating and less condescending of thirty-three year old female with facial laceration who had been bumped from surgery three times already.
All night, B sat there. Once he joined me in Lakewood, he didn't leave, and nothing, no pain meds, nothing was as comforting as opening my eyes to see him there, rocking in his chair, trying to doze, jerking awake whoever I moved to make sure I was okay. Solid, present, there. This is why I love him. Once he works through the "why" of a crappy situation, he puts it behind him and he cares, ridiculously deeply. He's difficult until things get difficult, and then he's a rock. He puts his head down and he plows through and no matter how things keep piling on, he takes it on. He's a pretty good person to have on ones side in a crisis.
About that time, the surgeon stopped back by, obviously agitated, yelled a little about how he was trying his hardest to get to me but now he couldn't because the power was off, and he had a plane to catch, and he was upset too about my having waited all night, told me he thought he'd found someone to replace him, and left. And with him, hope abandoned me. They pushed me back up to my room, pain and nausea meds finally became available, and I slept. When I woke up, it was because it was day and I was again being wheeled to pre-op.
And there, a tall, young, angular man said he was the plastic surgeon who had rearranged his day and rescheduled his morning clinic appointments at his swanky Boulder private plastic surgery practice to come suture the facial laceration he had heard about at the end of his shift the day before. So how about we get that cut closed up, he said perkily. Oh, yes, please, I mumbled under the gauze. Alright, he said, let's take a quick look at that. He plucked off the gauze and froze a bit, then immediately swung around and started barking orders and saying things like "don't do that here, let's just do that all in the OR", they pushed a sedative into my IV and the last thing I remember him saying is "you probably won't remember much after this".
I felt like I jerked awake, confused about where I was, and Bobby stood there with an old friend we used to bike with, back when we lived in Summit County pre-kid. I tried to smile and welcome him, but the strange sensations in my face yanked me back to reality. Bobby took a picture of my face and showed it to me, and I can't even explain the relief of seeing it put back together. My mouth was no longer full of gravel. My lips were enormous, and criss-crossed with stitches, but they were in the correct general location. My cheek was no longer a squishy, dangling flap, and no lip-gummy worm flopped across it.
Later, when he got a break at his clinic, the surgeon stopped back by and I thanked him for galloping in on his white horse and rescuing me. He shook his head. "I'm not sure about the white horse part. I was here when you got here last night, I could have done it then if I had known they weren't going to get you in. And I could have done it at any point during the night if they had called me. You shouldn't have had to wait so long."
I like this guy.
The rest of the stay was boring stuff. I slept a lot. Swelling hit epic levels sometime during the first night, so they called in an ear, nose, and threat specialist, since one of my saliva glands apparently got annihilated and couldn't be located and reattached during surgery, and they thought the fluid accumulation in my jaw and neck might be saliva. But by the time they showed up, I was up and moving around, out of bed and sitting on the couch, and the swelling had gone down, working it's way from my jaw to my chin and neck. I finally got some food, puréed chicken noodle soup, and managed to syringe it into my mouth.
The kids stayed with Miss Dinta (my friend Ginta) the first night, then my parents dropped everything, jobs, summer projects, yard full of animals, and drove up from Kansas to stay with them. In my absence, my mom mommed my boys and did my laundry and dishes.
This is probably it for breastfeeding. When I got home, two little boys were completely freaked out by my new face and stared at me with big eyes. I picked them up and they melted into me, heads on my shoulder, and told me how much they had missed me. Little brother was afraid of my face, couldn't quite trust it was me, but when he finally looked up and met my eyes he relaxed, sighed, and snuggled into my arms. It wasn't long before they were asking to nurse, but I stuck band aids on my nipples and told them they had owies too, and they accepted my lie without question. I will admit, I'm both really excited about having my body be my own again, and really freaked out because I have witnessed Daniel bounce back from some pretty major trauma with the help of breastmilk, and I am allowing an extremely valuable and irreplaceable resource to dry up. Painfully, I might add. How long does it take for the pain and hardness to go away, anyway?!
At no point in his treatment has Daniel ever been without the dietary supplement of breastmilk. Probiotics are discouraged during treatment due to their very nature of being bacteria- they have a risk of harboring not only good bacteria but also not such good bacteria, I guess? But breastmilk has saved us after so many rounds of antibiotics. Between the ooligosaccharides that feed the few remaining good bacteria in his gut and the good fats and personalized antibodies, he has never seemed to need much nutritional support aside from it. But it has also become increasingly difficult for me to keep doing it, both socially and physiologically. He has been reluctant to let go of it as a source of comfort, even after months of constant redirecting and trying to find other ways to help him emotionally process his world. I have been stuck walking the fine line of letting him have enough to benefit him physically while being sensitive to the social stigma of nursing a preschooler. Public awareness of full term breastfeeding has really not hit the places we've lived yet, and it gets exhausting constantly being an advocate and activist and educating people about why I haven't yet weaned a four year old. (Four is a common age for a healthy, free range child to wean in cultures that accept self-weaning, by the way. I would imagine the fact that my four year old has not yet chosen to do so has something to do with, I dunno, HIS CANCER TREATMENT.) In the last year, however, his latch has changed. It was never great. It has been uncomfortable to breastfeed him from day one. But now his jaw and mouth are maturing and it is getting even more awful, and the nursing aversions are about as powerful as during pregnancy. So I'm conflicted. I feel stupid letting things dry up and losing this invaluable resource, but on the other hand, here is my chance. He has not been able to nurse for ten days now, due to all the meds I've been on. He's starting to work through his stages of grief. If I let him do it again, relactate, no telling when he'll decide to quit on his own.
Little, I have fewer qualms about. He is still quite enthused about it as well, and quite crushed that they have been unavailable, but he is ridiculously healthy. His latch, which has never been painful like Big's, is still comfortable, and I have no problem with nursing him past two years old, but the problem with tandem nursing is you almost have to wean simultaneously.
My dad left the day I was discharged to go back home and deal with things there, and my mom stayed until just the other day. It was so great having her here. I mean it really doesn't matter how old you are, and how much of an adult you have everyone fooled into thinking of you as, sometimes you just need an adult. An adultier adult. And your mommy.
I am still feeling beyond wiped out, for some reason. I don't understand it. Aside from my reassembled face, which has lost 95% of its swelling and is healing amazingly well, my body is fine. So where is my stamina? Why does a flight of stairs suddenly have me sucking wind?
Except, I guess, I did have a ton of narcotics. I quit cold turkey and embraced the pain when I started to realize that I was starting to feel anxious and shaky whenever they wore off, and was starting to think I needed them without considering my pain level. Also a ton (and a half) of antibiotics. Also general anesthesia. Also not only physical trauma of tearing off part of my face, but the emotional trauma of not being able to deal with it until the next day. Also I abruptly stopped eating and developed a complicated relationship with food, having to decide if the pain of eating was worth it. So I lost ten pounds the unhealthy way, by forcing my suddenly inactive body to cannibalize itself.
I still try to get out and do something at least once a day, if only a trip to the store. I had one mini meltdown, the night after I was discharged we went to a free concert by the lake and several thousand people did double takes when they saw my face, but I'm attributing the resulting blues to my sheer exhaustion that night. I hit a wall and couldn't go much further, but still forced myself to because I desperately wanted things to feel normal, so I dragged everyone to the concert and immediately regretted it when the wind blew painfully on my face, we had to walk fifteen minutes from parking, and the exhaustion hit hard as soon as we sat down. I'm not really self conscious, aside from that night. Mostly I feel like I'm in a weird social experiment, constantly noting the reactions of people around me. They want to stare, but try to pretend they aren't. They start to smile at me, then see my face and short-circuit, then studiously ignore me. It's been interesting. I've been them so many times, I know the feeling well. Why can't we just genuinely not see the ways in which we are different? Why does otherness insist on setting off alarm bells for us in spite of us knowing perfectly well that we are all the same deep down? Not just physical disfigurements, although those are huge, but inherent differences. I was forced into a healthy amount of discomfort this winter during the week Keystone had a massive black ski summit, as hard as little extremely Caucasian me tried to deny it and act totally normal. No, I didn't feel endangered. No, there is no specific bias I carry. It was just being so surrounded by otherness that made my circuits blink a little, and the more ashamed of that fact I felt, the more crummy I felt about myself. I can't help that I was raised around only white and brown people, so anyone darker than Latino automatically seems exotic and other-ish to me. But then my two year old, utterly oblivious to subtext, blew my cover by having a meltdown over having to ride in an elevator full of very large, very black men. His reaction was mine, just on the surface. He knew he was perfectly safe, but the otherness just fried his circuits for a minute and he had to back up, release some emotion, and process. It is a very good experience for me to be on the other side of those sorts of reactions, to be the Other. It is an experience I have missed out on most of my life, unless you count being the only kid in the only openly dysfunctional family in Religious Mr. Roger's neighborhood growing up.
It will be temporary; once the icky, cheesy grossness sloughs off and reveals the new, pink skin underneath, it will be less noticeable. My mouth and cheek may regrow the nerves and muscles needed to stop the paralyzed droop and my lips may eventually need another surgery to get a semblance of their shape back and be able to close them, but already the scars across my cheek where the shreds of skin were tidied up and sewn together are smoothing out, a testament to the tiny, skillful surface sutures placed there by my new favorite plastic surgeon. My otherness is fading fast. My social experiment in being unenviably extra-ordinary will end soon, as will my opportunity to be bemused by the way people interact with people.
My surgery was on Monday, June 26. On my birthday, Friday the 30th, B drove me to Denver, I popped my last pain pill and steeled myself for an ordeal, and found my way into the lovely, calm interior of a Boulder private plastic surgeon's office. I won't lie, it was trippy. My only other experience with plastic surgery was through my mom's breast reconstruction after her mastectomy, and that was an office located in a cancer center. The other patients were mostly simply trying to get their lives back, trying to put their horrible experiences behind them by rebuilding their bodies to resemble something they were familiar with. This was a very different experience. The conversation was flowing in the crowded waiting room. Women openly discussing their perceived flaws, the work they needed. In my world, it is impolite to those around you to discuss the things you hate about yourself, because those around you may possess those same features or worse. A mom with two kids on vacation needing Botox, another mom excited about being able to fit in her jeans again in a week, another micro analyzing her own and her daughter's faces for sun damage and areas that needed more "fullness". It was so, so foreign. Talk about otherness. I realized no physical differences will ever separate me from other humans, or make me more uncomfortable around them, than class differences. I was the crude one there, the philistine, with my eight year old purse with the shredded carrying strap, my river sandals, my snagged yoga pants from Old Navy, my sun damage and patchy eyebrows and gross mountain bike injury. The receptionist immediately identified me as "The Mountain Biker" and asked about my crash. I spoke a little louder than needed, knowing I had center stage, as I gushed about how happy I was with my new face. Because the honest truth is, I judged the Botox Belles just as much as they judged me. I realized I carry a lot of judgement toward women who feel their lives will gain meaning when they conform to some arbitrary standard of beauty, and spend so much money to attain those standards. I trust the people I perceive to share my values and interests more than I trust someone I perceive as self absorbed based only on one facet of their lives. I considered what sort of person would wish to provide the services these women seek- one who sees an opportunity to make a lot of money, or one who sees the same flaws these people (I've been saying women, but there were several silent men there as well) see in themselves?
Once in a chair in his office, the stitch removal hurting like crazy, I told him again how surprised I was that I still recognized myself, how grateful I was he had come in to put me back together, and how I probably had not been giving plastic surgeons enough credit, seeing the tiny, precise sutures and how smoothly the wounds were healing. He nodded. "Yeah, most people think we only do boobs and facelifts, but reconstructive surgery is a huge part of what I do."
And now I wonder even more- how does someone go from reconstructing the aftermaths of horrible accidents in the morning, to liposuction and injecting Botox and butt fat (or something) into faces in the afternoons? How does one switch between perfecting the bodies and faces of Boulder's most vain elite to fishing hamburgerized saliva glands from Summit County's most stupid, and everything in between, without experiencing completely disorienting culture shock? Our conversation switched to Daniel's chemo appointment that morning, and how resilient people can be, and he told me about a friend who survived cancer to return to pro hockey. I nodded. "Humans are amazing." He shook his head. "Not all of them", he muttered under his breath. So many answers to so many questions I hadn't asked.
So there you have it. Since Friday, I've slept when I can, which hasn't exactly been easy, first because of steroids and itchy antibiotics, then my painful face, kids who are adjusting to not nursing, and for some reason, I suspect the lack of gut flora thanks to the antibiotics, constant heartburn. My biggest issue currently is that I am too easily exhausted and my face is too sensitive to go outside for long, which is beyond frustrating. My kids are getting too much screen time and all I want to do is what we did before last week- live outside.
In the meantime, we changed Andy the Dog's food and had another diarrheapocalypse. We came home a few weeks ago to poop soup everywhere, soaked into the carpet pad. It was the last straw. The carpet was already smelly and we already didn't trust it to not be growing bacteria harmful to Big's fragile immune system, but after the pooptastrophe, we decided to find whatever cheapest vinyl floor covering we could and yank out the carpet. However, the layout of our house is incredibly stupid and obviously not designed by someone who has ever lived in a house. The enormous kitchen bar crowded into the walkway and living area, leaving about six feet left for living room furniture and a kitchen that was exhausting to cook in, running from one side to the other as one does ones thing. So before we could lay flooring, we demolished the bar, salvaged the cabinetry and reconfigured it, making a much smaller, more sensible kitchen. That part isn't costing much since we're reusing most of it, but it has been massively time consuming and inconvenient. Because the one thing you should always do following trauma and surgery, when you still have a sprained wrist, is a home remodel. I've been far less helpful than I planned on being. Handyman has been far more gracious about that than he would have been in the past.
I guess all in all, in a messed up way, it has sort of been a vacation. I mean, there were no cocktails on a beach or romantic hot spring soaks, but I did get narcotics and a romantic shower where I sat on a hospital shower bench while the love of my life held the shower head for me while I cautiously washed away all the gross drainage and cheesy layer from my face while we played "count the bruises" on my body. There were no kids or responsibilities for a few days, so we got to just hang out together and talk and reconnect. We needed to do that so badly. B was there for me, with me, the whole time after that first afternoon when he ran around like a maniac trying to finish work and get to me. Amazingly, solidly, comfortingly there. The one person I wanted and needed was right there, translating my mumbling and typed requests for pain meds, helping me up and down, trying to cheer me up. I can't even tell you the difference it makes to go through an ordeal alone, versus going through it with someone who would do anything for you. Even loan you his bike in the future. Even hold your hand and tell you you're pretty when you resemble a zombie from the Walking Dead. I needed to be cared for the way he cared for me, he needed to know how much I appreciate him being in my life. Next time maybe I won't remove my face to get a date.
