Leaving the hospital is like departing on a flight with engine trouble. There are going to be delays. No one seems in a hurry to see you go. People go about their business, someone comes by to do another test, you think -- ah, the definitive last check, but then someone else comes by and says one more is needed. Food trays come in, food trays go out. You think about ordering groceries for home, about taking a shower, but maybe that's the wrong move. Maybe you should wait, much like you would wait at the gate, because maybe they will have called your flight just as you stepped in the shower stall. And then you will have missed your chance to leave.
And the sunshine outside is brilliant and I can just imagine the breeze passing through farmhouse spaces right now and say, doesn't anyone want to get me out of here today?
I think about how chaotic these days have been. No one's plans have been completely upended, but my sickness has changed things for sure. For the Polish travelers, for my family, for Ed. For me. I haven't been admitted to a hospital since my brain hemorrhage thirty years ago. I'm your average healthy Joe, (though the staff here keeps telling me that I'm the most with-it 69 year old on the floor. Well now, that can have many interpretations. Sick but with it. Is it better to be that, or well but out of it, of declining sharpness? Fuzzy on the brain but spry as a pony?)
It takes a while to bounce back from something that was so intense, but I tend not to look back so I'm sure I'll be scheming again soon enough.
*. * *
Once again, I am home. Warm, mellow evening light, birds butterflies bees, Ed.
How easy it is to assume it will always be thus. A farmhouse, always waiting for you to come home to it. Ed, inside, ready to launch the next project. But how easy, too, it is to grow weak, even after a year of such energy that there wasn't much I couldn't do before that game changing Wednesday in New York. Right now, a walk in the farmette fields is about as much as I can handle in an afternoon. Afterwards -- I'm ready for a long nap!
*. * *
This is the time to add a special thank you to all my good friends who have reached out to us these past few days. The sweet words! Suzanne, that soup and the wild rice salad!!
All of you are awesome people who know how to put a smile into people's lives.
I'll leave you with a quote that came to me from from Jean in Australia -- “there’s no such thing as a healthy person. Only an under investigated one.” A thousand tests and a million speculative diagnoses later, I surely have to agree!
With so much love...
