Heart Attack

            A few days ago, we learned that Kim had a heart attack. Kim was pretty sure that’s what was happening when she was wading for Petoskey stones – a clenching tightness in her chest that was different from the array of pains that are part of her daily life. She has been dealing with fibromyalgia and arthritis for many years, and cancer and then surgery related back pain for the last several. But this was different, and she knew it. We sat on our Adirondack chairs as she described the pain and we discussed whether to call 911. I fetched her two aspirin from the house, but the pain was starting to release before she took them, and about 40 minutes after it began, the pain was gone. We sat there for about half an hour, waiting to see if there would be a return and vowing to call 911 if it happened. It didn’t. We made our way carefully up the stairs to the house. I held her hand firmly.

            Later that afternoon we spoke with a doctor who was conveniently visiting our neighbors, Rick and Sandy. We described the symptoms to him, and he suggested that we see our physician “better sooner than later,” by which he meant “better sooner than too late.” We had appointments on Friday (this was Monday) for our annual physical with our family doctor, an excellent diagnostician, and we decided to wait. This may have been a mistake, but we got away with it.

            Friday’s doctor’s appointment confirmed what he called “irregularities” on her EKG, what he described as a “T-wave inversion.” Though this was a term that I had not encountered as an English major, I knew that it was not a good thing.

            Now, what?

            We went from the doctor’s office to the cancer center for Kim’s monthly infusion and then spent much of the drive home processing the news. Kim says that during her attack she thought, “Better to die quickly of a heart attack than suffer a lingering painful death from cancer,” whose return she is awaiting, instantly adding, “but not yet.” (This echoes St. Augustine’s famous prayer, ““Lord, make me chaste – but not yet!”)We have been thinking in terms of our Ten-Year Plan, with five active years in our new house and then, maybe, five more somewhat compromised years. The prospect of sudden death changes all that.

            One of the first changes we made, after committing to a healthier diet and daily walks, was to add to her “Five Wishes” end-of-life instructions, “NO CPR!” Chest compressions would mean a likely breaking of the cage apparatus enclosing her spinal cord, leading, most likely, to paralysis. Nope – rejected option in your mid-70s, though a possibility when younger.

            The doctor said that he usually recommends a stress test following a heart attack like Kim’s, but he cautioned that a stress test sometimes itself leads to heart failure, and with Kim’s no CPR instruction, this might not be a good idea. They made an appointment for the stress test in a week, allowing that much time to think and talk it over. The other option, he said, is to “let nature take its course.” This is what she decided to do.

            Now, what?

            Kim told Ben, our grandson, “I’ll do whatever the hell I want, for as long as I can,” but we are making some changes. Thursday, before the official diagnosis, we decided to trade our new mattress for an upgrade to a bed that allows the head, knees and/or feet to be raised, with a wave and vibration functions. It’s an expensive version of the hospital bed we rented for Kim when she was rehabbing at home for a month following her surgery. Just in case. We are eating more oatmeal, less bacon and red meat, more veggies, less sugar – a tough one if you’ve tasted Kim’s scones, cookies and pies. Karen, our neighbor, has brought us cucumbers and lettuce – before she knew of the heart attack. We are talking about cutting our nightly drink. I wonder if talking about it is good for heart health.

            Saturday found Kim planting flowers, almost as if nothing had happened. She did, however, ask me to dig a somewhat deep and difficult hole, and she took over watering our extensive new plantings because, she says, she finds it “relaxing” and “zen-like.” She pointed out to me that newly planted perennials don’t look great until the third year, which I think is a good thing. Our newly planted trees will start to fill out in 5-10 years. We are just about finished with the installation phase of our landscaping – and our lives – and we are moving into the maintenance phase.

            Kim is pissed off at me for writing this, as calling attention to herself in this way is not her style, not who she is. But I need to write it for me, as a caretaker. Yesterday we worked with Rick and Sandy to build a small rock wall. Kim, with her stubborn German heritage, was right there with us, but she was only lifting the smaller rocks.

Pain

            I know a little bit about pain. For about ten years I suffered from cluster headaches, also known as “suicide headaches.” About every three months I would have a month with two or three per day, each one lasting about an hour. Eventually I learned from a nurse that breathing pure oxygen would stop them, so I got a prescription for a regulator and oxygen, and it worked. Eventually, they stopped paying their visits. “One of the benefits,” my doc said, “of getting older.” For more on cluster headaches, JFGI.

            I mention this not to attract sympathy – I am grateful for the oxygen and the eventual disappearance. No, I am interested in other people’s pain – how to understand it. The issue occurs to me because for the last month Kim has been experiencing a lot of pain in her back, hips, butt, and legs. It keeps her from sleeping. If it were anyone but Kim it would limit her activity, but she is still out there pulling weeds, moving rocks (“only small ones!”) and planting flowers and bushes. I still do the heavy lifting, and she will stop if I speak to her sternly. Her son, Scott, got angry and yelled at her, and her daughter, Genne’, a physical therapist, explained the potential permanent damage that might occur, but they aren’t around on a daily basis. Kim is constitutionally unable to stop working if I am working where she can see me.

            How bad is her pain? The docs and nurses use a 10-point scale. Kim usually scores at around 6, largely due to fibromyalgia and some arthritis, but lately she’s been at 8 or 9 – high enough to drive her to her oncologist to get a painkiller prescription. She wanted enough to get her through our move to the cottage, a process that will begin in a week or two depending on whether Godot Construction gets our home finished. We figure that the process will take about a month, if you include time spent moving furniture around and getting everything in place.

            How does Kim’s pain compare with my cluster headaches? If we both gave them the same numerical rating, does that make them “the same”? Would using colors be a better way to describe the quality of pain? Some pain is red, some yellow (my hockey puck cuts), some purple (cluster headaches). Or maybe as music – some heavy metal, some the Bee Gees, some Beethoven’s Ninth (but not in a good way). I remember when my brother John was having his mental illness diagnosed after he was arrested. They had to put a label on him, ending up with schizo-affective disorder. That’s like looking at a cloud and asking if its shape is a square, triangle, or rhombus. Everyone’s pain is qualitatively different. A common high bar for pain is childbirth, an experience with which I am unsurprisingly unqualified to speak. Kim mentioned the pain of extensive burns, which she sees as a 10, but more research needs to be done – research that I don’t want any part of. We just can’t know what a pain sufferer is feeling.

            I am currently pain free, but I know from my experiences with the common cold that if I experienced pain anything like Kim’s, I would make sure I was heavily drugged, without Kim’s hesitations about addiction and her reluctance to be too groggy to landscape our hillside and butterfly garden. And when we move in, who thinks she will trust me to put all the kitchen-ware, her art gear and photo equipment where it belongs? I predict that she will pop a pill to help her sleep and tough it out the rest of the time.

            Her stoicism makes it hard for me – or anyone else – to know how much pain she is suffering. I still sit back, most days, and let her cook dinner after a day of landscaping – though I usually offer to do the dishes all by myself. Maybe she should wear a flag with a number on it, or perhaps a color. But she doesn’t like to talk about her pain. Another thing we don’t talk about: The nurse-practitioner who prescribed pain pills suggested the pain might be a sign of her cancer’s spreading. We push that thought aside by keeping busy. Next set of scans will be in a couple of months.

            Another dimension of pain is that experienced by the loving witness. No, it’s nothing like the pain itself, but still . . .. Pain is the body’s signal that something is wrong, and you should do something about it, or maybe stop doing something. Hard to do or stop doing when it’s your beloved’s pain, and you feel helpless. Get a back pillow? Give a shoulder massage? Hold her hand when she has to step up or down? Remind her to take a pain pill? Help her walk to the couch when back spasms make her kitchen work impossible? Put on her shoe or sock when she can’t? Grab that rock before she can pick it up? It may sound like a lot, but it’s not. It’s not adequate, not at all . . ..

            “What I do with my pain,” Kim says, “is focus my attention on what I enjoy – photography and just being outside, building this house despite the frustrations, and taking care of my husband.” Sometimes, however, the pain becomes too much. Today, however, we are turning in measurements for our shower door that someone failed to order, buying paintable switch-plate covers, getting a table out of storage to see if it fits in the bathroom, and driving to Charlevoix for lunch, a haircut, and some relaxation. She reports that she is having a good day, pain-wise.

“But You Look Great!”?

            “But you look great!”

            A nice compliment to Kim, I suppose, even considering the tone of surprise. She’s gone through 10 surgeries and 3 courses of radiation, and she’s taking a variety of pills, shots and infusions. She feels shitty much of the time. But she looks great.

            Kim gets a variation of this when talking on the phone: “But you sound great!”

            “How am I supposed to sound?”

            I suppose that people have an idea in mind about how people are supposed to sound when being treated for stage 4 cancer, and Kim’s voice and appearance don’t fit that image. If you feel shitty, you should look and sound shitty. Otherwise, people are confused. This doesn’t happen so often when Kim is using her walker while wearing her back brace, but it still happens.

            One of my tasks as Kim’s advocate is to look for signs of her pain and fatigue and announce to our guests, “OK, it’s nap time – thanks for stopping by.” She has taken maybe a dozen naps in the 27 years that we’ve been married, but now she takes one or two a day while the healing takes place. The fact that most people our age take daily naps doesn’t matter. Kim does not want to be a napper – there’s too much that needs to be done!  She needs encouragement to nap, and I provide it – just another song in my nursing repertoire.

            It’s Kim’s fault that people are confused. Self-pity is simply not part of her vocabulary – or if it is, she keeps it private. She is stoic. We both grew up in families and times where seeking sympathy was frowned upon. I still hear my father’s voice: “You’re crying? Well, I’ll give you something to cry about . . ..” That usually dried up my tears. Showing pain was a sign of weak character.

            I suppose I could train Kim to look and sound as pained, fatigued, and sometimes discouraged as she occasionally feels: more moaning, grimaces, sudden shouts of pain. She’s working, with suggestions from Genne’, on strengthening her back and straightening her posture, but perhaps she should also practice a defeated slumped-over look, at least around company.

            But no, because what Kim enjoys most is the joyful connection with friends and family – in person, or by phone, text, email or card. When she is connected that way, she rises to the occasion, summoning energy and cheer from her deep but finite reserves, and she looks and sounds great. It’s contagious. She brings out the best in all of us.

P.S.  Kim says people are probably tired reading about her – I should write about something else. I say that it’s my blog and I’ll write whatever the fuck I want.

           

            

Prognosis

            Kim and I are underway in the long process of healing from her back surgery, and this week we started to treat this latest attack from cancer: first radiation, and then whatever medicine the oncologist suggests.

            We have asked our doctors about the prognosis. The word is derived from Greek words meaning “before” and “know.” This origin is misleading. Our future with cancer, wherever or however it might pop up next, is not at all known, or even knowable. The definition of “prognosis” includes words like “probable” and “likely,” and our doctors use words like “might,” “may,” “possibly,” “as long as” and “several years.” These words are a long way from “know” in the root of the word.

            The word “gnosis,” interestingly, means “knowledge of spiritual mysteries,” which appears oxymoronic because aren’t mysteries mysteries because they are unknown?

            But still, that word “know” lingers as a troubling reminder of how far from really knowing we are. We are living with uncertainties. Of course, we have always been living that way, but now we are more aware of it. There was always the possibility that we would get hit by a bus, or that a refrigerator would fall out of an airplane to crush us while we were going for a walk. But this uncertainty is different, largely, in my case, because the course of our lives had seemed pretty secure, even including the certainty that we would grow old and die. And then cancer jolted us off the rails.

            There are some near-future uncertainties:

·      How will Kim respond to radiation? So far, nausea and fatigue, which she is fighting through.

·      Will the upcoming PET-scan show more cancer in Kim’s body?

·      How quickly will the pain subside?

·      When will we be able to remove the rented hospital bed from our living room?

·      How long will Trump stay in office?

·      When will the idiots get dumped from The Bachelorette?

            But there are larger uncertainties, too:

            Two of our docs said that with metastasized cancer, we can never say that we are “cancer free,” or that we are “cured.” One said that the situation is more like “managing a chronic illness.” Think diabetes, fibromyalgia or arthritis, two of which Kim has been “managing” for many years. “Managing” sounds like a good thing, and Kim is a good manager. But “cured” sounds a whole lot better. What will it be like to manage her illness? We were given descriptions of possible medications in our future, each with about two pages of side effects. The description said the side effects would end when the treatment ended – which in our case would be never. Genne’ suggested that we research the probabilities of each side effect for each medication, stated as percentages, but that information is very hard to find. Instead we find words like “common” or “rare.”

            There is also uncertainty about where will we live, and how will we live there? We are going ahead with our plans to build a home on Torch Lake – that’s one of Kim’s passions – but what will it be like to live there if Kim’s recovery is not complete – and how can it be complete with stage 4 cancer? At the same time, we are looking at houses with Alice because it's a lot easier to buy a house than to build one. And if recovery is complete - her disease "managed" - then there is a good chance that we will become old. It happens. Then what?

            Perhaps the quantum physicists are right. In Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, a cat is trapped in a box with a vial of poison that is released when a radioactive atom randomly decays. You cannot tell if the cat is alive or dead without opening the box. Schrodinger argued that until you open the box and look inside, the cat is neither alive nor dead but in “an indeterminate state.” We are the cat in the box. Always have been, but we are just now realizing it.

            Kim said the other night, with a wisdom that is typical of her, “Whatever happens, I want to do it with grace.” If anyone can, she can. “Grace” is one of my favorite words.

            Coming home from a session of radiation therapy I picked up the mail. It included an ad from a local funeral home. I said, “Fuck you!” and gracefully tossed it in the trash.


Comments welcome at dstring@ix.netcom.com.

Nurse

            I learned at lot at Amherst College, where the ideal graduate was described as “the Whole Man.” The means to this end was the Core Curriculum of required courses and distribution requirements. Nursing was, decidedly, not part of the Core Curriculum. I’ve had to that learn on my own.

            Wound care is definitely part of nursing, and I have successfully observed the hospital nurses, and then Genne’, change the dressing of Kim’s foot-long incision down the center of her back. My education was successful, as when Genne’ left on Wednesday, Kim’s wound no longer needed a dressing. Now I will watch for the steri-strips to fall out, a task well within my skillset.

            Kim has to be very careful with her newly repaired spine. One of the doctors said she should avoid BLT: bending, lifting, twisting. Kim is fortunate to have me around to help her get dressed. This is harder than it looks. The first time I put on her socks I put one on inside out, and then I had to decide whether I should match the second one to the first or take it off and start over. I put on her pajama top backwards twice, but to my credit I did not put it on upside down. Kim is working hard to dress herself.

            Kim is going to have to wear a brace for several months. Fortunately, this is not the turtle-shell device we feared, and she does not need to wear it when lying down, which is most of the time. A good nurse knows how to put on and then remove the brace. She has to put it on when lying down, which involves her log-rolling (hips and shoulders on the same plane) while I reach the device around her, in a nursely embrace, and then clip it shut. This act resembles a hug. Kim, my independent woman, is learning to do it on her own.

            Then there are the bathroom related activities – not easy while observing BLT. We bought Kim a deluxe wiping device that looks a lot like the toilet brush that Kim bought for me, thinking I would clean the toilets, with a place to clip a wad of paper. We took it back. Kim found a way. My job as a nurse was to flush the toilet because Kim can’t reach back or down to do it.

            Showers are another BLT challenge. I watched Genne’ give her mother a shower using the showerhead on a hose that I installed ALL BY MYSELF. Kim is a modest woman, so I tried not to look, focusing instead on the process and the equipment. Afterwards, Genne’ suggested that we hire someone to come in twice a week for the showers. She knows her mom – and me – pretty well. I would not consider this a nursing defeat because, after all, I did hook up that showerhead. Randy thinks I might enjoy bathing Kim. We’ll see.

            Genne’, of course, was the real nurse for the week she was here – caring for her mom, analyzing her pain as a gifted physical therapist and then dealing with doctors to try to come up with the best solutions. She also coached Kim on the best ways to move, sit, recline, get up from the toilet, get into a car – all those daily motions that most of us take for granted. Then there was the occasional affectionate massage and the ongoing words of encouragement, paired with alerts that she had better take a rest.

            And Scott came up to give her a break from our nursing. He took his mom for a walk outside, which for Kim was a spiritual experience.

            Kim has been resting and sleeping on a rented hospital bed in the living room. It features a continuously inflating mattress that provides a pulsating surface that eases her back pain (somewhat). It also provides a sound track for our new life: the continuous hum of the air pump punctuated by shrieks and moans that the mattress emits when it’s pumped too full or Kim moves suddenly. Or it may be our haunted mental institution speaking through the mattress.

            In some ways, things are slowly getting back to normal. Kim and I have resumed going for walks, though they are usually in the hall outside our door with Kim driving her walker. And we are just about out of carryout leftovers and gift casseroles, so Monday under Kim’s direct supervision I fixed mac and cheese – a success even though I’d bought Swiss cheese instead of Cheddar and topped it with slivered almonds. My efforts sometimes amuse her, helping her healing.

            And Sunday she spent the night in our bed instead of the hospital bed in the living room, and I briefly made love to her right arm. Nice to wake up with your wife in bed with you!

            On top of her ongoing pain and her feeling helplessly bedridden, Kim worries that I will resent all the caretaking I am doing – which is about half of what she has been doing daily for the last 26 years. No worries, Kim. Nursing, however clumsy, can still be an act of love.

            

Hang On

            Kim may be surprised to learn that taking care of a house requires a lot of work. While she has been doing her brave and painful thing in re-hab, I am doing her thing in our condo. Where my previous duties involved taking out the trash, getting the mail, helping make the bed and drying dishes, now I have to do a bit more.

            The toaster, for example, does not shake out its own crumbs. I have to do it! And the mold in my shower does not simply die of old age and then evaporate. No! Who knew?! You get the idea . . ..

            Before you get to feeling too sorry for me, I should note that with Kim’s encouragement, I hired Olga to come in and do the cleaning. She put in four hours on Tuesday, and to her credit, she didn’t make any comments about the quality of my cleaning in the weeks before she arrived. (One of my duties is “floors,” which I take to mean “visible parts of the floors.”) She mopped our cork floors using diluted white vinegar – something I’d read about but never tried. Kim is coming home today. I’m trying not to spoil Olga’s handiwork.

            Then there is cooking. So far I have gotten by with breakfast cereal, peanut butter sandwiches, and the meat loaf and chicken salad that Abbey thoughtfully donated, paired with carrot sticks and red wine. Saturday was my first real cooking (if you don’t count toast): bacon and scrambled eggs. For dinner.

I pause here to veer off in a different direction.

            I miss her. Even when I’m enjoying my bachelor solitude, I miss her. Kim is in a rehab facility about 200 yards from where I sit, and I’m not there, and I miss her. When I clean the condo, I try to do it to her standards – knowing I will fall short, but I try. (When I had to ask her where she kept the big bucket of cleaning supplies, I was embarrassed and she was not surprised.) When I go to bed at night, I fold down the blanket on her side, as if she were going to join me.

            And today she is coming home, but it won’t be to our old life. I have been working to prepare our condo for her arrival – shopping for a hospital bed, raised toilet seat with rails, grab bars (she does not want chrome – preferring brushed nickel – appearance not being my primary concern), and we moved my old reclining Archie Bunker chair out of storage so she can sit at an angle that does not damage her back. She will be using a walker for months – Marsha loaned us a deluxe model with large wheels and a place for camera gear, but still . . .. She is in so much pain – Monday was her worst day yet – with her repaired spine so fragile, that hugs are dangerous and thus avoided. Genne’ arrived Tuesday, and with her loving expertise Kim has made major improvements, but her pain is still my pain.

            And then yesterday, when I became visibly frustrated because I could not get a human being on the phone so I could resubmit our application for a handicapped parking tag, Kim had me lean over so she could comfort me! “I’m supposed to be comforting you,” I told her, fighting back my tears.

            No road trips for us in the near future. And how are we going to build that house on Torch Lake? Kim has to be involved in the process, but there is so much pain, so much limitation of movement, so much fatigue. And even when she has healed, or partially healed from the surgery, there is cancer that needs to be treated, and we still don’t know the precise nature of her cancer and thus the kind of treatment we will undergo. Together.

            And yet, and yet – she phoned me yesterday morning to say, “I have an idea!” Let the next adventure begin.

            “Uh-oh!" I said. "Hang on - here we go!”

In the Moment

            As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started reading a guide to mindfulness – living in the moment. Well, for now I have stopped reading it. There have been too many moments in which I do not want to live. Seeing Kim in so much pain, despite all the meds, after her six-hour spinal surgery is a moment – a long series of moments – that I regret having lived in, though I’m grateful for having lived through them.

            Living in future moments sometimes helps. I try to fast-forward to when Kim’s pain level is down below 5 from last night’s 9. I fast-forward to when Kim is back home and I am able to demonstrate my dormant caretaking skills. And I think about our future together, kayaking on the lake or simply enjoying a pain-free and cancer-free morning hug. The future is better than the present.

            Living in the future does not always work. Sitting with Genne’ in the well-named Waiting Room for 10 hours, we fearfully imagined the immediate future. Surgery always has risks, and major surgery means major risks. Possible paralysis loomed. Kim and I have discussed what to do with her ashes, how to divide up her estate, etc. It took a not-always-successful act of will to wrench our thoughts away from that future into whatever distraction we could find in a book or cell phone. Genne’ even responded to work-related phone calls as her mom’s back was being cut open, her spine rebuilt and reinforced, the cancer removed.

            As I write this Kim is starting to feel better. She looks like herself, and amazingly, she took a brief walk in the hall. Her pain slips in and out of control, and when it’s bad it’s a spear through my heart. My Amherst friend, Jerry Shimp, wrote of his wife’s illness, “I would never consider leukemia a good thing, but it has caused me to be more aware of my life's blessings, like friends who stay in closer touch and each day having its own gifts. We don't know how many more days we have at age 75.” Kim’s illness has caused me to feel closer to friends and family, especially Genne’, who has guided her mother (and me) through pre- and post-op, and closer to Kim. There is a kind of joy in living in this awareness of love  – a blessing indeed, though at a terrible cost.

Spring

            The secret to our enjoying Spring 2017 is to adjust our sense of time. If we live our lives in linear time, we are screwed. It’s a slow march toward senility and death, if truth be told, and for those of us who are not comforted by belief in the Afterlife, that’s a pretty grim prospect, especially when you are in your 70s. And when, as I sit here writing this, Kim awaits surgery to stabilize her back for radiation therapy after months of unrelenting pain, it is grim indeed. Short-term results are uncertain – we are in that gray area between hope and denial. Long-term results, for Kim and all of us, are quite certain. I recall a satirical headline in The Onion: “Death Rate Holds Steady at 100%.”

            Several years ago I published an article, “Surviving Act IV,” about the difficult move into a transition that involves aging, retirement, and the need to redefine our identity. Well, now we seem to be moving into Act V, and in Shakespearean tragedy, we know how that ends.

            Spring, however, presents us with an alternative to linear time in the form of cyclical time. I used to experience it regularly when I was teaching, especially in the fall with new students every year. I cycled through the curriculum, with September featuring old-guy (maybe 40) Odysseus kicking butt, and April with English Romantic poetry. My students were always the same age, and this, in a way, allowed me to deny linear time.

            Now that I am retired, it is spring that puts me into cyclical time. Spring demonstrates renewal – buds, blossoms, birds, baseball – a welcome alternative to the long one-way downward slide. We cycle from day to night to day, wakefulness to sleep to reawakening. We cycle from healthy to sick, then to regained health. Usually. But not always . . ..

            And then there is stopped time. I’ve started reading Mindfulness by Tessa Watt. The first exercise involves living in the moment by fully experiencing a raisin. We didn’t have one (I didn’t think of mining the Raisin Bran), so I used a prune, left over from our long drive back to Traverse City. As instructed, I looked at it closely, felt the textures with my fingers, smelled it, even listened to it as I squeezed it near my ear. And then I slowly and deliberately tasted it. Yes, it worked! I was in the moment, and while in that moment Kim and I were not inching toward mortality.

            It doesn’t have to be prunes. Genne’ can stop time tasting a glass of wine, and I suppose I can, too. I can stop time touching and smelling Kim’s hair, tasting the Spanish rice with sausage she has prepared, despite her back, or listening to the sound of spring right outside our window.

            Another way to deal with linear time is to change the subject from Time to Love. By “Love” I don’t mean something you feel, but something you do. I recall that when Kim and I were dating, I summoned up enough courage to tell her, “I love you.” Her response? “Prove it.” How wise is that?!

            I’m not sure what happens to time when I am loving, but it feels suspended rather than stopped. When I am loving Kim, by folding the laundry, hustling to the drug store, or listening to each other recount the night’s dreams, our mortality is irrelevant – or maybe it even enhances the experience of love. Receiving love also mitigates the pain of linear time. We love phone calls from family and friends. We were moved when Fleda and Jerry left a beautiful green plant at our door, and when Alice brought over a pot of chicken soup. And I don’t think I ever saw Kim so profoundly joyful as when Genne’ told her this afternoon that she and Reilly, her daughter, were getting three birds tattooed on their ankles –three generations of women, linked together. I’m generally not a big fan of tattoos, but I’ll make an exception when they create a triumph of love over mortality – over time itself.

Twisted

            Ever wonder just how many muscles and joints are involved in the simple act of getting into a car? Or getting into bed? Give yourself a twisted rib (as painful as it sounds), combined with some sort of extreme “rotation” of the spinal column and seasoned with muscle spasms, and then you will have some idea of the mechanics.

            The plan was to drive from Traverse City down to visit our daughter Genne’ in Gainesville, Florida – a trip of about 1400 miles if you count the digressions. We travel, you see, with digressions, one of the benefits of being old and retired. Kim’s back was a bit sore before we left, but that’s nothing new – one of the non-benefits of aging. If it hurt more than usual, she did not let on. Perhaps her plantar fasciitis was a distraction from back problems. Our new friend Abbey provided a pain-killing spray and some other goodies to ease the trip, and we were off.

            We spent two nights with our son in Northville, with a day trip to Ann Arbor, and then a night in Lebanon, Ohio, with its 1805 hotel and antique shops, and then Shaker Village in central Kentucky, and then the I-75 trek through Tennessee and Georgia broken into 300-mile days. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

            As our long drive continued, Kim could not help but indicate how painful her back was becoming, especially when getting in and out of the car. The last few days of our trip I felt like I was accompanied by someone with Tourette Syndrome. Her sudden cries of pain did not always include profanity, but sometimes they did. (If I didn’t know better, I’d have guessed that she was giving birth out of her back.) Kim had spontaneous cries of pain when getting into or out of bed in our motel rooms, or sometimes just trying to get comfortable. I’m surprised that people in adjoining rooms did not call the police.

            We had a heart-warming experience at a Hilton Garden Inn in Valdosta, Georgia. The sharp pains made it impossible for Kim to sit and rotate into bed, so we thought she might have to sleep in the relatively firm chair. I went down the hall to beg an extra blanket, and the desk clerk graciously obliged. A few minutes later I was back at the desk, begging for a glass of milk so Kim could take two Advil to try to help with the pain. Again she obliged – at no charge.

            Kim’s pain was so severe that I telephoned Genne’, a gifted physical therapist, for advice. After telling us that it is impossible to diagnose anyone over the phone, she suggested a complex series of stretches and positions, which I passed along to Kim. It was a bit like having a civilian land an airplane by hearing instructions radioed up from the control tower, but eventually (it took three phone calls) it worked and Kim and I were able to sleep. The free drink coupon from the hotel helped me nod off.

            And finally, in the morning as we were about to leave we needed another pillow for the car to replace the one we left behind in Kentucky. I asked if they would sell us one, or if not, how much they would charge our bill if we stole one. The clerk, a different girl, said she would check with the manager. She emerged from the back room with a smile saying that she could not sell it to us but she could give it to us in exchange for a positive Trip Advisor review. I agreed, and the pillow made a big difference.

            Getting to Genne’s house made an even bigger difference. Shortly after we arrived, her portable table was unfolded and the stretches and counter-rotations began in earnest.

            One of the more difficult aspects of this experience, apart from the pain, is that Kim is the one who usually takes care of other people, mainly me, but now she was asking me to take care of her. For example, the twisting motion when you reach for your seat belt and twist back to hook it up was excruciating, so when Kim got into the car I would pull out the belt to the proper length and then hand it to her to click in place. I unloaded our luggage at Genne’s with minimal assistance, and I made our bed.

Any experiences with pain that you'd care to revisit? Email them to dstring@ix.netcom.com.