A weekend off

Sadly, the high winds that we had here on Thursday knocked the wreath off the nail that it was hanging on, and broke the eggs that were in the nest. When I came home Thursday evening I saw the wreath lying on the front porch, and asked Bob to go out and look. I don't think he was going to tell me that there had been eggs in it, but I had to ask. I know it's stupid, but it made me cry.

The day had just been awful. I've got a former client threatening to sue me, and saying terrible things about me, and I've been worried about the medical bills that are piling up. Coming home to find the little nest on the ground was kind of the last straw, I guess. I cried a little bit, then shook it off and changed my clothes, and we went out and ordered a pizza, then drove around a little before coming back to pick it up. It turned out to be a nice night anyway.

After the stress of last week, I ended up really taking the weekend off. I got the oil changed in the car on Saturday, did some grocery shopping, went out and saw my folks today, cooked chicken and rice for dinner, and read three Kindle books on the iPhone.

I've been having trouble sleeping; it seems that no matter when I go to bed, I wake up at 4:00 or 4:30 and can't go back to sleep. It happened Saturday morning, so rather than lie there sleepless, or get up, I got my iPhone and read. I read Patricia Briggs' "Silver Borne," which was great. Briggs is one of my favorite authors. Silver Borne is the latest in her "Mercy Thompson" series about a shapeshifter--Mercy shifts into coyote form--who was raised with werewolves. The series is really well written. She's started another spin-off series called Alpha and Omega which is wonderful, too.

Then I read a couple of books that I had gotten for free. Publishers have started offering Kindle books for free to introduce their authors and hopefully generate some interest in their other books. I don't download all of the free ones, but if I see one that looks like it might be interesting, I do. I read You Can't Stop Me, by Max Allan Collins and Matthew Clemens (although I see that it's no longer free), and The Dark Tide, by Andrew Gross (which is still free).

I enjoyed both of them, and ended up buying a second book by Gross, Don't Look Twice, which I'm reading now. I really like reading on the iPhone. If I'm in bed, and I don't want to turn on the light and wake Bob up, I switch the font to white type on a black background, and increase the type size a little. I like that I can hold it in one hand and touch the screen to flip the pages. It's getting so I don't really want to hold a big book, I'm so used to reading on the phone.

After I came out of surgery, I really felt pretty good. I actually thought that once I was home I could start working and expected to get a lot done the week I was home. Ha. That turned out to be VERY far from what actually happened.

The surgery was on Sunday, and I got to go home on Monday. The way they do laparoscopic surgery, they blow your abdominal cavity up like a balloon with gas, then make several incisions through which they insert the surgical instruments, fiber optic lights, and something that feeds images to a television monitor. Or something like that. Anyway, they fill you up with carbon dioxide gas, and it takes awhile to dissipate.

It feels like really awful heartburn, and you just have to wait it out. We filled my pain medication prescription, but taking them made the heartburn worse, so after the first day, I didn't take them. Everything tasted awful to me. Bob had gone out and bought pudding cups and jello, and the first night I was home he made me a grilled cheese sandwich and cream of mushroom soup, but I couldn't eat anything. The only thing that sounded--and tasted--good to me was fruit, so he got me some canned peaches and pineapple and grapefruit, and I ventured out one day and bought some ready-made smoothies, and that's what I lived on for most of the week.

I couldn't get up enough energy to do anything at all, so I spent most of the week on the couch watching television. I watched a lot of television, mostly old sitcoms--The Golden Girls, The Cosby Show, like that. One day I ran across "Early Edition" on the SyFy Network, the show about the guy who gets tomorrow's newspaper each morning, and then goes out and tries to stop all the bad things that are going to happen. I must have watched five or six episodes in a row.

I had a hard time sleeping, and spent a couple of nights in the recliner in Bob's office, reading. One night I didn't sleep at all, I read Barbara Bretton's Laced With Magic, which she had sent me and which I had been saving. One day I stayed in bed all day and read Blackout, by Connie Willis, which I had gotten from the library.

I spent the whole week like that--watching television, resting, reading--and made a couple of short trips out to the grocery store for fruit and milk and cereal--Rice Krispies was the one other thing that sounded good to me, with bananas. An hour out was about all I could do before I started really fading, but Bob said it was good for me to get out a little and try to build my strength back up. I went back to work the next week, and except for getting tired easily, didn't have any ill effects.

I'm feeling fine now, and seem to be able to eat anything I want. I assume that the reason food was tasting so weird to me was the anesthetic still working its way out of my system; everything tastes fine now. I lost about 15 pounds while I was in the hospital, and have put 4 or 5 back on, but that's fine. I'm just glad to be able to eat again!

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