All of this past 10 days, I've been reliving last year. You know, the way women mentally review their labor and delivery on their kids' birthdays every year (you don't?).
Curlygirl caught Covid right before Christmas. I came to her house and wrapped about a thousand presents for the kids, masked and at a social distance, of course. Christmas morning was celebrated in their garage, since the kids had gone to stay with Gammy to avoid contagion. Curlygirl's boo recovered. She still has not. Physically she is still doing poorly. Emotionally she seems to be improving. Last night at dinner she was laughing about how people comment on how "good she looks" in her pictures. She said, "I'm SICK, not UGLY!" That is one of the best descriptions of chronic illness I've ever heard.
Babygirl's crisis started right after Christmas, when what appeared to be a generic stomach bug turned deadly within a few days.
By this time last year, Babygirl was on a vent with a feeding tube, central and arterial lines in, facing emergency dialysis. She'd already had her first two of what would be many blood transfusions. And I was still thinking that maybe they could halt the rejection and save the kidney. And I'd had the best two hours of sleep in my life on the padded bench in her ICU room.
Yesterday I was on the phone with our internet provider for well over an hour. The internet got turned off because our new tenants turned theirs on, and there was some confusion about which side of the house they were supposed to be working on. Since the new tenants now "owned the account" Spectrum needed their permission to fix it. This would be merely an inconvenience if we didn't need internet to run the dialysis machine programming. But be that as it may...
Babygirl expressed sympathy for the frustration. But last year, by lunchtime on New Year's Eve, we'd been in 2 ERs, had the express lights-and-sirens ambulance ride between them, been intubated and hustled to the ICU. I hadn't had a proper night's sleep in over a week, and was standing soley on adrenaline.
Yup, I'll take conversing with the (oddly, extremely helpful) support staff at Spectrum all day any day over that. I did draw the line at switching to Spectrum as our phone provider. We've been knocked off the internet 3 times in the last 8 months for incredibly stupid reasons, so I'll keep my phone provider separate, ThankYouVeryMuch.
I'm glad to see 2022 out the door. But, as always, I'm not making plans or resolutions. Things will be what they are, so I do my best to keep my mind blank about the future. It's a far better alternative than worrying over what I cannot control.
DeeDee
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