As you can imagine, with a household consisting of two ‘officially’ (according to the DMV, anyway) disabled adults who take forever to do most simple tasks, like shop or cook meals, we have pared our schedule down to the barest essentials.
So, of course, today, not quite one full day after Linda received her liberating KneeWalker scooter, we set off for that most essential of the barest essentials: manicures!
It only took 3 hours door-to-door to pull car around to the front, help Linda down steps and path to the car, load her scooter into the back (didn’t fit on first try), make our way down Menlo’s street’s (crawling with recently vigorous traffic enforcement) to Sky Nails, Menlo’s best nail parlor and repeat the process in reverse (with a stop at TJ’s for breakfast yogurt).
Nearby merchant Mark Ghanbari spotted us as we pulled up near his rug gallery, and rushed out with his dog, Chipper to help us get Linda and the scooter out of the car. Great guy, and we love the beatiful rugs he’s sold us over the years.
Sky nails gave us the usual warm welcome, efficiently manicured us, and then, when I mentioned I was having some trouble with a sore toe, plunged me into a pedicure machine and repaired an ingrown toenail. The gimps came home tired but feeling much better…
by gulker on July 30, 2009
Dear friend Maggie Pringle brought us dinner last night (a fabulous salmon salad) shortly after UPS delivered a KneeWalker scooter for Linda. Of course the scooter came packed in foam peanuts, which are hard enough to deal with for the able-bodied, and a real and messy challenge for us gimps.
Maggie unpacked dinner, then perched herself on the floor with yoga-like grace and proceeded to do most of the work resolving the some-assembly-required problem. She also packed up the shipping box and peanuts, then vacuumed the kitchen before heading out for an evening class. What a sweetheart! I wish we could hire Maggie… photo by the ‘patient.’
It occurred to me that, after almost 30 years of marriage, Linda and I are now in the midst of spending (at leat) 30 days together, pretty much 24/7 after her Achilles tendon surgery. I don’t think we’ve ever been in each other’s constant company for such a long period.
True, we spent some 20 days together in Ameugny last May, but we were sharing a house (and company) with a number of other friends, old and new. And we were mobile – able to take long walks in the beautiful countryside, and easily drive to nearby cute towns to try out the restaurants and vintners.
As I write, it’s just us and the walls of our abode on Oak Knoll Lane, an interesting prospect. My shrink suggested we start a blog about the experience. I think Linda has started one, but I don’t have the URL (yet)…
Spouse Linda came home from surgeon Larry Oloff’s office today, sporting a hot pink cast (her choice of color) after a post-op inspection of the incision, which is healing nicely so far. She still can’t put any weight on the foot (3 days down, 27 to go), but the cast allows her to get around the house (including the ‘World HQ’ office) with a bit more confidence. We are still making our way, slowly, with a little help from our friends…
The first angels, dear friends David and Ricki Perry, came down from Portland, via San Francisco, arrived with a delicious lunch in hand, then set to work doing thankless tasks that are particularly hard for our current mutual misconfigurations. David moved Linda’s icing machine while Ricki changed the water in various flower arrangements, gifts from friends, that have been cheering up the house. After a very amusing hour of catching up and hearing tales of the Episcopal Church’s recent general convention, they departed, but not before doing the lunch dishes.
The second angel looked suspiciously like a dishwasher repairman, toolbox and all. He departed, not on white wings, but in a white van, leaving a rejuvenated and fully functional dishwasher. Saints be praised!
Then a genuine angel, our saintly friend Anne Peterson called from downtown Menlo, offering to pick up and deliver dinner (roasted chicken and cole slaw). Hallelujah! Life is looking up, especially compared to yesterday…
No sooner had Linda and I settled into our new life of reversed caregiver roles (the lame leading the lamer) when our rock-solid, hardworking and, as it happened, fully-loaded dishwasher broke.
Added to the wrenched back and my new duties waiting on an immobile, bed-ridden mate, unloading and hand washing four days worth of dishes made it seem like we weren’t exactly on the top of the ‘luck’ list. Linda mentioned the other day, after her surgery was scheduled, that we’d had more personal disasters since moving north than previously when we lived in southern California.
I thought about that, and then realized we’d been in our 20s and 30s in SoCal, and in our 40s and now late 50s here in the promised land of northern California. So it’s not geography, it’s age: more bad stuff – parents’ deaths, illness et al. – happen later, rather than earlier, in life.
Things did improve when morning community member Judy dropped off a puzzle and summer novels for the patient (prettily gift-wrapped), and neighbor, fellow Trinity member Maggie Pringle arrived with flowers and a basket of baby heirloom tomatoes that ultimately wound up on our dinner plate. Life is an arc, it would seem…
by gulker on July 25, 2009
Linda, home from surgery
Ms. Hubbard Gulker returned home yesterday afternoon, chipper and alert, after a mid-morning surgical procedure to repair her left Achilles tendon. The surgeon offered an excellent prognosis, saying the procedure had gone very well.
Unfortunately, the hard part of this experience has just begun: Linda has to stay off the foot for 30 days. For those who know my athletic better half, who is used to daily runs of 4 to 7 miles, doing nothing is going to be hard.
There’s also the issue of her hemiplegic helpmate, who, slow-moving at the best of times, managed to throw his back out at the gym the morning of the surgery, making him even slower. Yesterday was a slapstick of the lame leading the lamer, worthy of a Laurel and Hardy skit. But, somehow, with timely help from godson Nate and his mom, Kay, we made it through…
It was the new exercise bar, that did it, I think. Yesterday I started mounting a grab bar on the patio, the better to do some of the trickier Heidi exercises that keep me honest and on track for physical rehab. I find I just feel better when I can point to something real and tangible that I’ve accomplished.
I chronicled the hour it took me to get the bar positioned, yesterday, albeit badly (I stripped the head off the Phillips screw I used to tack up the bar) and it took a couple more hours today to get new hardware and tools, reposition the bar, remove the stripped screw and install and tighten 6 new #10 wood screws. But I did it. Thirty minutes work for the old moi, maybe 4 hours, total, for the new corporeal configuration, but it happened.
So then we did a couple sets of exercises that involve stepping repeatedly on a tricky, partially-inflated half-sphere called a Bosu, that requires (for me, anyway) a solid support on one side, and which exercises have not proceeded well at home with improvised support (like the bedpost).
The only downside today was anticipating spouse’s Achilles tendon surgery tomorrow as we picked up prescriptions and made other preparations and plans, after which we face a protracted period of recovery. We are now, or will soon be, officially, the House o’ Gimp…
These words greeted me on a T-shirt at Fremont Park’s weekday concert this evening and got me thinking about where my time goes in re: why I miss blog posts.
Today I actually logged what I did and how long it took. The big time hogs:
- 2 hours – gym – strength rehab (7:45 – 9:45)
- 1.75 hours – write and bundle up notes, parcels and international letters, take to post office (12 – 1:45)
- 1.5 hours – prepare picnic dinner for park concert (5 – 6:30)
- 1.25 hours Peet’s – buy coffee beans, drink latté, read ‘Evolution of God‘ (1:45 – 3)
- 1 hour – phase 1 mounting exercise bar on patio (3 – 4)
- 1 hour – nap (4 – 5)
- 55 minutes – email and other computer distraction (not including blogging)
OK, so the nap and Peet’s stop were not exactly productive, but a guy’s got to live…
So, we come to the end of a long day (yes, for me, 9:30 is the end – for what it’s worth, we rise at 6) that had its share of ups and downs.
The thoughtful, well-written, syntactically-correct post that’s been at the back of our mind all day probably isn’t going to happen until tomorrow. But we”re determined not to look like we’re falling off the blog wagon, again. We did post a photo and caption over at InMenlo, also, for what that’s worth. Still digging…
