As an adult, these are skills and abilities that I take for granted. Not really thinking about how often I do both of these everyday.
After surgery, while I’m standing with a patch over my eye waiting for instructions on when to get the eye checked, the doc casually says, “You’ll need to lay back for three days.”
“So, just take it easy?” I said.
“No, literally lay back. You need to be on your back for the next three days.”
“Uh, okay.”
Matt helps me to the car (carefully calling out the steps as we head back to the car, for which I’m grateful, I would likely have fallen down the steep, concrete steps). I lean the seat back and doze on the way to the transfer spot where Matt and Mark have decided they will “transfer the package.” The package, obviously, being me; they’re so clever, these boys, they’ve turned this drama into a spy adventure, either that or a drug transaction. Not sure which of those two scenarios I prefer.
Mark lets his work know that he’ll be working from home for the rest of the week and settles in to fixing meals and transporting kids and taking care of me, AND trying to work full days.
Turns out, the hardest part of all of this is keeping me down, on my back, preferably not complaining (not that he said this, but I’m sure he thought it).
Have you ever had to spend three days FLAT on your back? My back started to ache by the end of the first day, but I wasn’t really paying much attention to it at that point, because the patch over my eye was wrinkled and irritating. I took it off early that next morning (12 hours before I was supposed to remove it), to see if I could figure out why it was bothering me so much. My eye must have watered the night before because the gauze was not soft and smooth, but rather the opposite. Clever girl that I am, I turned the outside patch inside out so that the inner, and consequently smoother side (having not been vexed by the secretions of my eye all night) is touching my eye. Ahhhh, much better. A little less tightly attached to my head now, so it’s slipping around some, but since I’m supposed to be flat on my back, this should, theoretically not be an issue.
I am a hard girl to keep down. I drank a lot of water, partially so I’d have an excuse to get up and walk to the bathroom.
By the end of the third day I was much more plagued by my back than my eye. At that point, my eye, other than the floaters and blurriness, really wasn’t an issue. My back, on the other hand, was killing me! And I wasn’t quiet about it. Poor husband.
Well, he survived.
I, on the other hand, complained bitterly about not reading. Have you ever tried to NOT read? You know, things like the calendar to see what’s happening that day, or the cookbook, or the writing on the shirt of the person in front of you. It’s maddening! I had no idea that I read all day. I didn’t really miss the driving all that much, but that’s only because I had a chauffeur for the things I needed to get to. If I’d been stranded at home with no driver and no ability to drive, that would not have been pretty.
Eye surgery. It’s not for sissies.
SongMom
