Year: 2017

Today was Edda’s follow up with the surgeon – 1 month post op.  OK, not quite a month, but pretty close.  The doctor was pleased with her progress; impressed that she’s able to walk well and the X-rays look great.  Just a few things to remember: mainly prophylactic antibiotics before teeth cleaning for two years.  She’s cleared for camp activities – horseback riding, swimming, walking, all OK.  I asked if he does feet as well and he said, sure, let’s take a look at them now. We had him look at her splayed out foot and he wasn’t worried about it as long as we braced it (which we are doing already) and he said he’d be happy to track it as we come for back for spinal appointments in the future.  He actually said we could go to a smaller foot brace and that it “didn’t look too bad” to him.  It feels good to have this behind us!

To recap.  Before:

After:

Father’s Day was a bit of a dud.  We all woke up on the wrong side of the bed and were arguing before 10am.  Not good.  It’s one of those days that starts off poorly and no matter how much you try to rescue the day (joke? cookie? hugs? outing?), you always fall back into a funk.  Even though most of the day was trying, we managed to get ourselves to Sunday night dinner where there was much laughter, even though it was a tough week for the Martins all around.  We went to bed, ready to be more cheerful on Monday.  Looking back on it, I think that it was a sign that I needed to go back to work after three weeks of caring for Edda.  

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Eliana is staying the week to take care of Edda during the days this week, which means that I’m easing back into work.

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Jeremy gave Vince his own traveling knife set to celebrate the successful completion of ninth grade.  Vince wanted to take his own knives to the scout campouts.  They both managed to cut themselves on the new knives this weekend.  Vince lets it out to the air, Jeremy uses a finger condom.  Someone does dishes, the other person does not.

Vince went camping this weekend.  He’s really taken to cooking for his group of six.  No longer is he packing cup of soup for dinner and pop tarts for breakfast (OK maybe there are still poptarts).  This weekend he bought ribs, precooked them on Friday afternoon and then is planning on searing them and seasoning them at the campsite.  I think he may have also gotten potatoes and corn.  There are still hiccups in the whole process, the most notable one being that we originally bought the ribs on Wed night with the rest of the groceries for the weekend, just squeaking in under the $90 budget.  Then somehow, the ribs did not get refrigerated and we did not discover this until 2pm Friday.  Vince held the 2-day-old-warm ribs in his hands and said, well, they are in this airtight plastic package, maybe they’ll be OK?  I looked at him – really?  Do you really want all the boys to get food poisoning?  So we went out and bought another round of ribs for the campout which, of course, blew past the budget, but we subsidized the duplicate meat purchase.

And when I turned my head to look behind me, I saw immediately behind me the last day of school whizzing past me in a blur.  Vince went to school today with nothing more than his phone.  He forgot his copy of To Kill A Mockingbird in his backpack.  In order to not incur any fines, he asked me to bring it in when I picked him up with Edda just before lunch.  We went to Tysons where we had conveyor belt sushi and I mulled over whether or not to eat the Pikachu shaped dessert (very yellow).

Is this where I get all sentimental about the kids growing up?   Maybe.  My kids!  So much fun/work. Keep on going!  Let’s go!  There’s lots more to see/do in the world.

Edda has acquired a new skill since the surgery.  When she’s walking around (and I’m hovering near her), she’ll reach out and grab my hand and hold onto it tightly.  I can’t remember the last time this happened, probably in her babyhood before she lost the use of her hands.  It’s a surprising thing to feel her fingers grip tightly onto my fingers.  She can not modulate the pressure of her grip or change the orientation of her fingers or do any other regular hand-y things, but no matter.  I’ll take it!  Did somehow straightening her spine make something wake up in her hands?   Or was the whole thing so painful that she relearned how to hold onto my hand just enough to tell me to never, ever, do that spinal fusion thing to me again?  I don’t know.

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Bihan missed her bus today.  She went all the way downtown to catch it and showed up 10 min after the bus left.  So she headed back to Rockville to camp out here another night and since I was determined to take Edda on an outing, we went to lunch and then went shopping.

It’s nice to go shopping with an enthusiastic shopper, I often forget how women shop for clothes.  

The saleslady asked – is that your daughter (referring to Bihan – not Edda) and I paused because I’m not sure how to describe my relationship with Bihan.  No, I said, she’s my friend.  I’m totally middle aged – I’ve been mistaken as a mother to a person in their early twenties.

Karin’s book on John Ashbery arrived after a long pre-order.  Exciting!  Edda & I are going to read it together.

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Jeremy is thanking me for managing Edda’s recovery by getting me Rainier cherries.  We made almost it three weeks before we have our predictable argument – the one where I get all resentful doing the thing I agreed to do.  Lol.  D – Don’t worry!  I’ll take care of everything!  J – You sure?  I can take some time off.  D – Nah, it’ll be fine.  No worries.  And then in the middle of it all, I get all miffed that I’m taking care of everything.  How often can we have this argument which is totally my fault?  10,000 times over 10,000 different situations.

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Bihan made dinner for us on Tues night.

Including this famous Chinese dish – Coca Cola chicken wings?  Delicious!

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We visited Mr. Twigg’s class to say thank you and goodbye before school lets out for the summer.  Edda missed the last three weeks of school and I didn’t want to end the school year without checking in with her teachers and aides.  We showed off our renewed walking skills and everyone looked at her enormously long scar and we gave hugs all around.

Then Edda went to Target with me.  A day of outings, working our way back to normal.

Edda is a combination of the bookends of a person’s life.  Part toddler, part old fogey.  I spent most of the day within 2 feet of Edda, working on her walking, spotting her tipsiness, judging when she is tired.  I fed her leftover brisket from dinner last night, warmed in the microwave.  I eat my half of the brisket, right from the microwave, as hot as I can manage without burning the roof of my mouth and spread her half out on another plate to cool quickly and to make it easier to cut into bite sized pieces.  Her skin is smooth and clear, her incision so cleanly healing, her head is still small and heart shaped I can encircle her whole face in my hands and look at her face to see traces of me and Jeremy in it.  Yet, she has the posture of an old lady.  Now artificially straightened, there are still angles that look not quite right, her neck jutting awkwardly forward, a stiffness that should have come from age, but now come from metal suspension bridges tying her vertebrae together.

My to-do list is very short these days and I try to hold onto each day.  When I’m very busy, I imagine that when I have non-busy days, that they will somehow last longer than busy days; an afternoon that lasts a week, a lunch that lasts three hours.  But this does not happen, the day passes quickly even when there is nothing to do but follow someone around the house making sure she doesn’t tire and fall.

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I dropped of my parents at BWI to send them back to the West Coast.  I couldn’t have managed Jeremy’s business trip without them.  When they showed up, Edda was still taking Q8h oxycodone and not pleased with her situation.  Now that they’ve gone, Edda’s able to walk on her own around the house without pain.  It was a good recovery week.

I wore my pajamas all weekend.  Like even outside the house – like to yoga class, to lunches out, to Sunday night dinner.  I like to wear my pajamas all the time ever since I got these “joggers” as Vince calls them (not sweatpants).

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Kitachi helped us out on Saturday, we gave Edda a quick shower in the morning and set her up for lunch.

And my parents and Vince and I went to a concert with Kelly & Bihan.  (I might not have worn my pajamas to this event).

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Edda is progressing well (ignore her pissed off face in this photo).  Today, I put her on her own workout regimen to get her back to full Edda capabilities.  She’s been off of her feet for two weeks, so I gotta get her used to walking on her own for hours at a time which she wants to do, but I think isn’t strong enough to do yet.  So all day it was 25 min rest, 5 min walking with minimal assistance from about 9 am to dinner time.

We even made it out of the house for the first time since the surgery – where else? but to Sunday night dinner.

I think we are past the worst part of Edda’s home recovery.  She doesn’t really need pain meds anymore, though you can tell her leg muscles are weak and she’s still trying to adjust to her new body’s balancing points.  Before, her body was all tense with trying to manage the pain, but now her sleep is sound and deep.  Last night at 10:30 pm, after sleeping 80% of the day, Edda was awake taunting me and laughing softly at her movie video playing in her bedroom.  I took that as a sign she was well enough to be out of bed most of the day.  No more lazy days in bed in a painkiller stupor.  Today, she spent the whole morning in her wheelchair.  Then after lunch, we walked six houses down the block and then a nice nap in the afternoon and then a few more hours in her chair in the evening.  Hopefully, she won’t be up at 10:30pm.  It is incredible to me how much sleep I’m able to absorb this week as well.   I’m napping a lot with Edda and still able to fall asleep at night without a problem.   Maxi (you see her on the couch in the above photo?) has taken to sleeping in Edda’s room.  Maxi is looking out for Edda and I’m touched.

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A big step today for Vince towards becoming an independent adult; he got his first debit card.  His weekly allowance (which is $15 because he’s 15 years old, Edda gets $13 a week) auto deposits into the account every Tuesday.  He has the bank’s app loaded onto his phone.  He used his card to promptly to buy some stuff online and it immediately showed the transaction on his app.  He is very, very excited.  I had to do this because of his upcoming trip to China, but also really because it’s time to learn that even though $300 seems like an endless supply of money, it can go very, very quickly.  This evening, he’s like, I want to spend allll my money.  But I know I shouldn’t.  Yeah, that’s how it pretty much goes your whole life.  I told Jeremy about this in a phone conversation last night and he said, so we are giving up overseeing all his purchases?  Uh, yeah, I guess he can go buy all the weird crap he wants until his money runs out.

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I caught my mother matching together mismatched socks.  lol.  None of our socks match.  They almost match, but never do.

Vickey and Karuna came by on Wed and brought us so much lunch!  The gorgeous bundt/pound cake was only one of six? seven? delicious dishes.  I felt very spoiled (and full).  Originally lunch was scheduled to be on Thurs, but Vickey is my CNN/C-span maven/junkie and asked for a reschedule to accommodate the historic testimony.  I, of course, complied because I get all my world news from two sources: The New York Times and Vickey.  Sometimes after dinner, Jeremy’ll ask me to repeat “Vickey’s version” of an incident and he’ll nod his head, yeah that’s about right.  Jeremy is also, of course, a political news junkie, but he rarely sees anything on video, it’s all print or audio.  Vickey fills me in on the visual stuff because she’s got the TV turned to the news channel all day.  A side note: my friends are totally twinning in their stripy shirts.  A side note two: for at least ten minutes during the visit, we discussed polymer molecular weights and their distribution and at what point does it matter to the properties of the bulk material.  Women in STEM: we do talk about polymer science during a purely social event.

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My parents are here and goofy.

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Vince is cooking a lot.  He cooked the steak dinner last night.  He also made homemade chicken nuggets tonight.

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Vince was home from school today because the seniors had graduation today and all the teachers went downtown for the ceremony.  I worked a couple of hours today and here’s how the kids spent the morning.