Situation Report

Shave! Almost never get a picture of myself that I don't really hate, and I feel I have to post this one just because I don't hate it. Wish the bloody scabs on my forehead had come out more vivid but you can't have everything.

Yesterday at 2:00 am I was sitting on the edge of the couch I'd been sleeping on (it'a a sofa bed, but we'd decided not to bother to pull it out—no possibility of using the actual bed, a three-foot monster as unattainable for now as Everest) in a panic, wanting to travel down the hall for a pee but unable to nerve myself to getting up into the walker from an untried angle. It took two hours, and the kid surfacing from his own room like Dumbo's familiar with the magic feather to convince me it was possible. Waking up this morning with the same urge at a more suitable hour a little before 6:00 (we're pulling the bed out now, but otherwise similarly circumstanced) I was out to the toilet like a bat out of hell, maneuvering the walker through the byways of the little New York apartment (the hall is too narrow to tackle head on, and I have to make my way through it crabwise) with consummate skill, and finished in a couple of minutes.

And that in short is how it has been going. A series of inconceivable achievements, from the first step in the walker, leaving me exhausted for hours, after which they suddenly turn out to be easy tricks I do all the time. Every new skill I need turns out pretty easy to master, even though that first experience seems so overwhelming until I do master it. 

Pain is an issue, mostly pretty bearable but an awful distraction. Sometimes it's altogether gone (hospital acetominophen, and I am definitely going to be following our house horticulturalist's advice, maybe right after I hit post on this, with an edible present from the kids). 

I have to say how lucky I am, with a job that offers decent health insurance and a white man's license to tell people what I want. I congratulate myself on the heroism I bring to taking a pee because there are people around me letting me do that, and I know there are people all over town doing ten times more, unheralded and unremarked.

I'm also convinced (inshallah) that there's some kind of normal for me on the other side of this, and itt's not my time yet to be the old guy in the walker, though if it is I'll try to bring it some grace (there's a particularly lovely old lady on my street who carries her walker-with-seat and her book right around the block with her in the course of a day, following the sun,  and I mean that kind of grace). Anyway, be right back.