Healing at home

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And so began the home stretch on my road to recovery. On the plus side, my bed, my family, my media, my toys, uninterrupted sleep, and the support of my friends. In the minus column, no ability to get a breakout narcotic squirted through an IV when pain hit the 7 to 8 mark. 

Broadly, next steps were along these lines:

  • Recover for four weeks

  • Take on calories

  • Get calibrated to Stanford’s radiation gadgetry

  • Wait another week

  • Radiation treatment, five days a week for six weeks

  • Recover for one to two months

  • Back to work, slacker

I had a lot of time to kill.

Normally, I would have spent the first several weeks napping, eating chocolate pudding, and demanding sympathy from anyone willing to listen. But because of my wife’s brain surgery the week after my return home, we had to cut that bit short.

Originally our plan was to pack the house with family when Claire and I were down for the count, but it didn’t work out that way. The wild card, pretty much for everyone these days, is Covid. Normally, members of each of our families would have been happy to provide live-in help, but traveling from out of state is more than a little dicey and it was deemed too risky. 

My sister did travel from central California with the idea of staying on to help, but her husband had a serious medical concern of his own and we thought it best that she focus on him, rather than trying to divide her time among us.

We were on our own.

That makes the care calculation pretty easy: Who feels worse right now? In the beginning, it was Claire. By this time I was mostly off the narcotics and, though massively fatigued and still severely limited in what I could eat, I was able to provide the bare minimum of care. And that turned out to be doable. Our friends provided dinners so it was really just a matter of the morning and mid-day meals and making sure Claire got her pills on time. Our daughter dealt with those chores that absolutely needed doing, all the while trying to keep up with her college work remotely. We were anything but a happy household, but we got from one day to the next.

Claire eventually became more independent, which allowed me more down time to concentrate on…well, not much.

When you’re not infirmed, you have this notion that when you are, you’ll enjoy an enforced vacation where, guilt-free, you can spend hours reading, or watching movies, or playing video games, or using social media to finally exact revenge on that jerk, Mitch Jacobs, who bullied you in third grade. Cross the Rubicon into recovery, however, and you learn the truth. 

You feel like absolute shit. 

And when you feel like absolute shit, the last thing you want is to use your eyes for anything other than getting large, round, and tear-filled as you croak for another dose of dear-god-whatever-will-make-this-pain-in-my-throat-cease.

But eventually, that feeling fades and you need something to round out your days other than follow-up appointments and smoothies. Because I can’t entirely give myself up to empty-calorie media, I chose to watch as many versions of Hamlet as I could lay my hands on. I’d seen the play under outdoor wine-and-cheese circumstances, but that doesn’t really lend itself to understanding the play or providing the insight to ask why the hell the local Shakespeare company decided to extend the thing a half hour to include the Fortinbras stuff.

For the record, I watched the versions performed by Laurence Olivier (short, noir, and stagey), Kenneth Branagh (very long and very shouty), Mel Gibson (tres Gibsony with my favorite Ophelia, Helena Bonham Carter), and David Tennant (a little gimmicky, but a version I enjoyed a lot). I still have the Derek Jacobi version in queue.

(Oh, and Keanu Reeves. And by that I mean the John Wick trilogy, which, honestly, is just Hamlet on a larger scale, but with dog rather than dad motivation.)

For reading material, I ping-ponged between my favorite distraction authors, P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler.

As I write this, my time off expires in two days—10 weeks after my surgery date. Scroll back up a screen or two and you’ll see that doesn’t align with the original plan, which should have eaten up four to five months. The why of it requires a contemplation of unintended consequences.