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the one time when a big comfortable car might've been welcome
Wednesday, October 18 2017
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Gretchen sounded pretty chipper when she called me this morning from the hospital. She told me about having to use the bed pan several times last night to urinate, which is, she reported, an unpleasant experience, since you end up marinading in your own urine. But by this morning she was able to get up and go to the bathrooms. Still, she wasn't doing much more than pissing, as the narcotics had closed down all her other excretory functions. Later she sent me a private message in Facebook saying she'd sent an image text to my phone containing a photo of her diseased uterus, which had been snapped by that intern. Supposedly it was the most disgusting thing Gretchen had ever seen. Hearing that, I was sure I would never look at that picture. Later when Gretchen sent me another instant message asking if I'd looked, I said I hadn't and might never, and certainly didn't want to feel like I had to. Gretchen began her next post with, "You need to relax." Supposedly all our other friends had been delighted to see the disgusting thing, but the whole episode seemed in bad taste to me. Some things are better left unseen.
Gretchen's parents arrived with Gretchen some time this afternoon, but by then Gretchen wasn't doing as well. Part of the problem was the ride from Albany in a tiny Honda Fit. It seems whenever one goes to rent a car, one always gets "upgraded" to some gas guzzler one was trying to avoid. But on this occasion, the one time when a big comfortable car might've been welcome, they ended up with one of the smallest cars legal to drive in the United States. And, being designed for the youth market, Honda Fits have exceptionally stiff suspension that really only works well with supple adolescent bones. Not only was Gretchen's neck still hurting, but she was getting unpleasant feelings in her lower abdomen as her body tried to account for the missing pieces and the truncated infrastructure that had once supported them. Gretchen tried lying down in various places, but she had trouble getting comfortable. At some point she decided the only solution was narcotics (we now have a rather large supply of them).
Gretchen's parents had bought a bunch of sandwiches at Berben & Wolff's, a vegan delicatessin in Albany. The sandwiches are huge, and so for lunch I only ate a half of a reuben, which had been made with some sort of pastrami substitute, not tempeh.
Meanwhile, it was a rough day in the remote workplace. Cameron learned that the dog he'd known as a kid had finally died (she had been living with his estranged mother), and Nicole learned that surgery on her elderly pit bull would cost $5000. Considering my wife was uncomfortable in the other room in the aftermath of a hysterectomy, though, my workday wasn't all that beset by interruptions.
Because Gretchen's mother cannot stand even the mildest chill, I ran a fire all day in the woodstove, even though outside temperatures rose into the 70s.
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