dates...at last

With a surgical adventure this week, I had a psychological dry-run of sorts for the flight. The schedule for inguinal hernia surgery--third time, same spot--required me to be in the surgery waiting room at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, a kind of pre-departure lounge very like one in an airport. One television monitor showed the status of patients--by numbered, pale-colored blobs that oozed slowly, horizontally, across a grid from "scheduled" to "pre-op" to "OR" to "recovery." All other monitors for those awaiting flights--and their accompanying families, there to see them off--were fixed on a single channel that silently showed scenes reminiscent of those viewed by the people in the movie Soylant Green undergoing the early stages of euthanasia: mountain sunsets, mushrooms by mossy stones, white water birds taking flight, the tide going out. Across these scenes, like a slow IV drip, rolled bromides in white letters in a funerary font, paradoxically interesting only because of their shallowness, messages like "Life is good when there is hope," and "With a goal, life has meaning." These drips of mental anesthesia were given attribution as well, from The Wife of Bath to Sylvia Plath; these trivial snippets may have been cut from Bartlett's, though I can't imagine that any of the authors or speakers would have wished to see these thoughts a second time. We endured this for almost 5 hours before being summoned to pre-op. I slept through the flight. Around 9 p.m. an attendant rolled me out to B level in the parking garage of the medical center.

After taking great care of me for two days, Linda went back to work, and, even though I'm getting around fairly well, if sorely, I wrote her today to tell her I had been crawling on the floor since she left and surviving on toilet water and raw potatoes, the only food I could reach, on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Bruce kindly stopped by early this afternoon with a sundae for me from McDonald's. He also very graciously moved some boxes around for me, getting them out of the living room so the house seems a little less cluttered.

Our pack-out dates have finally been determined: we will be out of the house by the 14th and out of the country on the 22d. It feels a little bit frantic now. I met with our property manager this morning and passed over the keys, and I called State Farm to change the house insurance to that of a rental; afterwards I picked up our car titles at the bank, scheduled the cats' last visit to the vet to get health certificates, and tried in vain to get a cleaning company scheduled to come out on the 16th. This holiday weekend, while others are having grand times with their families, I shall stew and go over my lists and move some of my 50 sticky notes around.