Oh, Fickle!

Required listening for today:
Closer to Fine – Indigo Girls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsU57x59ejM


This is a fickle business. It’s all ups and downs and back and forths, I feel good, I feel lousy. I’m going home, I’m staying. We search for definitives but there are none. Heck the darn wordprocessor doesn’t even recognize the word. The doctor comes in and asks, “Do you want to go home?” “No Doc, it’s such a great place I want to stay here forever. You’re kidding right?” The doc is asking Renee to see where she stands on the issue, hoping the patient has some better insight. It’s a strange little tennis match. “You’re the doctor, am I going home?” Here’s some more fickle for you. “Well, let’s see how you do with breakfast and lunch.” This is a fill in doctor, the surgeon went on vacation after yesterday’s visit. “Bye, see ya, have a good time, we’ll be here trying to figure this stuff out on our own.”

Renee’s got her appetite back. She was supposed to get a normal meal for breakfast but she got the soft diet tray with nothing heavier than cream of wheat. Now we’ve got to order a fresh tray so that we can get food in her system and see if it stays down and flows through. Monitoring this operation is called the Lipton Tea Bag method.

Doctor Fill-in ordered a bedside ultrasound to make sure that Renee’s spasms are just part of the normal healing process and there is nothing else causing the pain. They’ll do that test sometime this morning. Its wait and see, hem and haw - we’re standing on the edge of the diving board listening for the lifeguard to blow the whistle saying it is safe to go in the water and swim down I-71 home.

True to form Renee has surpassed the estimated in hospital recovery time. And for a few moments the other day we doubted her. Is there no trust in the world? She may be fickle but she is consistent. Consistently fickle? Is that possible?

We might be headed home today and we mightn’t. Right now we are dancing on top of the fence. It’s a fickle business and things can go either way.