Year: 2016 (Page 3 of 6)

Today’s water is saline solution, tears, tepid tea, IV antibiotics and pain medications. We are back in the hospital.

This is the third time we’ve moved into a room on the ninth floor. This one is at the end of the hall.  It’s a smaller room, with only a sleeper chair instead of a pull-out couch. Instead of a panoramic view of the bay and San Francisco, we’re looking out at downtown Oakland. It’s a rainy, gray Sunday; drops are pelting the windows of our room.

A smaller room at the end of hall suits us better this time. We are tired. Less optimistic. Not caring if the room is nice, not caring about a million-dollar view.

My husband puts his favorite station–number 83, instrumental music–on his nurse-call/tv-remote handset, pulls on his tan no-slip socks, tucks his thin blue blanket up under his chin and closes his eyes for a nap. It almost feels like home.

With any surgery, there’s a chance of complications, and when you have complications, there’s a chance of more complications. He hit the jackpot.

I am not the patient, but I’m here with him many hours a day. It’s the most time we’ve spent together since our honeymoon. I’m trying to balance what needs to be done outside of the hospital with what needs to be done here: keeping him company, advocating for him when he needs something.

My schedule is on hold.  I’m not home to cook, and dishes from food grabbed and eaten quickly sit in the sink. I have to call someone to walk the dog or let him out to go potty. Laundry piles up. I lose track of days and dates. I go home in the evening and come back in the morning, doing only the bare bones of normal responsibilities.

When I’m home I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t want to think much, or talk either. I just feel tired. I might eat something, or just get in bed with a glass of wine and watch a show. When I’m away from the hospital, I feel like I might miss something important, but when I’m at the hospital, the day is spent waiting–for a doctor to visit, for new orders to come through, for the meal tray, for the next dose of pain meds, for healing.

This has been a little window into the lives of families dealing with chronic illness. I know I don’t understand it fully, because I still have the hope that this is just temporary, but the total disruption and the need to focus all my energy on the one who is sick must be the similar. For us, it’s a bump in the road, not the whole road. It’s been longer than I imagined, but it is not yet normal. I have new compassion for the ones that can’t see the end of this road.

It hasn’t been all bad. Easy for me to say, I suppose, since I haven’t been the one in pain. My husband would say it too, I think, or at least he will when the pain is gone.

It’s been nice to have quiet time. I work on my computer or read while he reads or dozes. Sometimes we play games or talk. It’s been a little like a snow day, hunkering down in the storm and staying in together. The companionship, the long days of just hanging out together, has been healing for both of us.

I almost hate to say that, because it has been an expensive time-out from daily life. It has cost my husband dearly in pain and suffering. It has taken a toll on his work, keeping him down for much of the last 10 weeks.

The benefits have been rich, though. The view from a hospital room always brings new perspective. Brushing up so close with mortality can’t help but shake up and re-order priorities. I feel like something broke open in both of us through this ordeal.

We’ve been married for 32 years. There’s a certain crustiness that builds up in relationships, and the familiarity of roles and routine makes it easy for us miss each other. We think we don’t have to pay attention because we know what the other one is thinking and doing. This experience pulled us up short.

Some of the crustiness has cracked off and revealed tender, fresh bits of our relationship that are alive under there, waiting for some fresh air and sunshine to start growing again.

The downstairs bathroom has always been the lesser bathroom. It was old, dated, and never really felt clean, even when it was mopped and swished and sprayed. The upstairs bathroom has been the “good”one, though it isn’t much to talk about either. It is dated and impossible to clean, too;  it has bathtub with a pitted, grimy finish and a squat vanity with a cracked sink. In spite of its flaws, it’s got old-house charm, with a light green tiled floor and wainscoting trimmed with dark green tile.

There was no charm downstairs. The 70’s vinyl flooring with the  gold and orange geometric pattern was peeling, and the shower was missing tiles in the ceiling. The floor of the shower came off in chunks, leaving the concrete pan exposed. When we first moved in 10 years ago, we took out the old broken-down vanity after it proved impossible to clean and replaced it with new Ikea sink, vanity and shelf. It helped a little.

A couple of years ago, we decided to spruce it up by putting new flooring down. The old stuff was glued to the concrete and could not be removed easily, so we put plywood  over it, installed the new flooring on top of that, sealed it all up and painted. It was a huge improvement.

Things have always been a little green and mossy around the outside of the shower, so we knew there was a moisture problem. We assumed it was splashing and leaking under the shower door onto the bathroom floor. We hoped that sealing it carefully would keep things dry. 

A couple of months ago, that bathroom started smelling strange. It reminded me of rhubarb, a sweet and sour smell; it wasn’t exactly bad, it was just wrong–something was happening in there that should not be. The odor was a strong and heavy. When I sprayed the shower with cleaner it lessened for a bit, but was back full force within a day or so. I was embarrassed to have guests stay down there. 

We decided it was time to remodel that bathroom.

When they pulled out the old tile, they found water and wet rot in all the wood around the shower, and cracks in the shower pan. Water had been pushing behind the tile through unsealed nail holes, cracks and other ways too mysterious to understand.

Water is a slippery character. Tumbling over rocks or washing up on sand, it looks so innocent and straightforward, but given the chance, it slithers into smaller and smaller spaces, dissolving, disintegrating, destroying. It is incessant, probing and prodding  for weak places to break down and invade. It’s the universal solvent. With enough time, it can carve out the Grand Canyon.

It had made it’s way under the new plywood subfloor and made it a harbor for mold and rot. Water was splashing on the floor, but it was also traveling down the wall and trickling through the shower floor.

Instead of making it cleaner and dryer, we had inadvertently sealed in the moisture we were trying to keep out. We made it worse. Rhubarb-stinky worse. 

Water itself is not the problem. The qualities that make it destructive also make it useful. Water is not often neutral. It is not going to flow in somewhere and just sit; it makes itself known, highlighting the breach by hosting some rot or mold.  As long as it keeps moving and doesn’t linger too long, it’s helpful, flushing and cleansing.

Showers are a good example of the good and damaging attributes of water: we get clean in them, but if the flow isn’t positive, they harbor mildew and worse.

The downstairs bathroom will be beautiful when it’s done–we picked tile and fixtures that fit in with the character of our old home, but meet current standards for moisture control and plumbing. For awhile at least, water will be our friend in that bathroom. 

Now that the upstairs bathroom has become the ugly one, we will eventually have to re-do that one too. There’s no telling what we’ll find behind those shower walls.

The first storm of the season has arrived and it’s supposed to be a big one. We have an inch accumulated in a bucket outside, so it already feels like a good soaking. 

Yesterday, the morning commute was a mess. The first rain makes the roads extra slippery, adding water to the accumulated dirt and oil that hasn’t yet been washed off, and after the dry summer, everyone has forgotten how to drive in rain. Not wanting to be on the roads, more people opt for public transportation when it rains, but it didn’t help much this time– by mid-morning BART had long delays system-wide. The city canceled tomorrow’s street fair because of the forecast of heavy rain and wind all day.

I want it to rain, I wish I could will it to rain–for the moisture, of course, but also for the way it slows everything down and makes it ok to duck under cover and take a breath. I love the way weather has the ability to change my plans and put things into perspective. A storm makes a regular busy  weekend into  an opportunity to catch up on my reading and knitting. I made beef stew and beer bread (you have to try the beer bread mix at Trader Joe’s!) and am ready for some good old-fashioned hunkering down.

Bay Area storms often dump less water than they promise, and the clouds and bluster give way to sunshine and business-as-usual again too quickly for my liking. A couple of years ago, the weather experts told us a big one was coming. School was canceled and the whole Bay Area braced for what was dubbed “Hella Storm.” It did show up, but it wasn’t the big event we were all prepared for. It was just a good storm. It felt like a let-down.

We’ve started believing that we can know and plan for everything weather-related. It’s very convenient; I can check what’s coming in the next ten days without looking out the window. It’s certainly helpful to  give people in the path of a storm time to prepare or evacuate, but I wonder if another motivation is to make modern life weather-proof, to get to the point that weather can’t interrupt our busyness or disrupt our lives. If we know what’s going to happen, we can side-step it and plan around it.  It’s the illusion of control.

Maybe it was better when we didn’t have the technology to track weather systems so accurately. The old-fashioned ways of predicting weather kept it a mystery. Seeing rings around the moon, feeling an ache in my bad knee, looking for a green tint to the sky or watching to see how many nuts the squirrels are storing seems more like a weather premonition than a promise, but I’m ok with uncertainty in weather. It’s changeable by nature.  Even with modern equipment and knowledge of how weather works, storms still seem to  have a mind of their own. We can see what weather is doing but not exactly what it’s going to do.

Technology makes us feel like we know what’s coming, but looking at the clouds and smelling rain in the wind isn’t a bad way to gauge things either. Whether we know what’s coming ten days out or just feel the drops and grab a jacket, we can’t control it.

The weather ap on my phone says it’s supposed to start raining early tomorrow morning and keep up all day. I guess I won’t make any plans, though–I’ll wait to hear the pitter-patter of raindrops on my roof.