Paying it Forward

This week I helped my friend, Tara, who traveled to Scottsdale (in the Phoenix area) to get some extensive inner ear surgery done. She’s from Albuquerque, but decided to get her surgery done at the Mayo clinic instead. Smart decision! It’s not that there’s not some good doctors in Albuquerque – certainly there are. But Albuquerque is not a major mecca of great medicine. That’s why I had my cancer surgery done in Boston (that, plus Emily’s help was invaluable).

The Mayo clinic is a bit over two hours from my house, so Tara and I got a hotel for the night prior and the night after the surgery. We didn’t know the time of her surgery until the evening before, and it would have been difficult to drive all the way up there in time for an early morning slot. Also I didn’t think she would feel up to the drive home immediately after the surgery (and she wasn’t).

I arrived before Tara, so I went out to eat by myself, which I rarely do. I didn’t feel like driving anywhere in the Scottsdale rush hour, so I just walked to the closest place, which was a fancy pizza place. (Most places in Scottsdale are quite nice – it’s an affluent area.)

It wasn’t crowded because it wasn’t quite dinner time yet.

I didn’t feel like pizza, but I figured I could get a salad. As I was reading the menu, one of the descriptions of one of the salads mentioned that instead of a chicken salad, you could get the chicken on a bed of sautéed spinach and mushrooms. This was just hidden at the end of the description of one of the salads – I can’t believe I even spotted it. It’s so rare to find good vegetables at restaurants – particularly at a pizza place!

The first night at the hotel, the night before her surgery, the wind got so bad it woke us up with all the noise outside. It sounded like a million things dragging and flapping. I couldn’t believe how loud it was, and it just went on and on. It seemed like a hurricane in the desert out there. At least it conveniently drowned out any noise of late-night people in hallways! But it was very unsettling, at an already stressful time.

The next morning we headed to the hospital. The hospital personnel didn’t want me to leave after they took Tara into the surgery prep room (where I was not allowed). I had plenty of time to leave and come back later, but they wanted me to stay on the premises. Probably in case there were any complications. So I just hung around the entire day. There is actually a hotel on premises, but it was completely full, so our hotel was offsite.

At the clinic, they had two big boards listing updates for each patient (identified by a patient number for privacy). Earlier in the day it was mostly beige and yellow for registration and pre-op, and later in the day there were a lot that were all done.

The Mayo grounds are very pretty.

I would have spent more time outside, but unfortunately it was cold and windy. The weather in Arizona has been unseasonably cold. I keep thinking I don’t have the right to whine about the weather because after all, I’m lucky enough to live in Arizona. But still, I’m expecting warm sunny days and not getting them!

By the time Tara’s surgery was done and she was able to leave the hospital, it was 8:00 at night and I had a big migraine. Probably from the windy weather, although hanging out all day at a hospital presumably didn’t help. And of course Tara was in much worse shape than I was. She was groggy from the meds and in a lot of pain. I could barely get her back to our hotel room. In hindsight I should have asked the hotel staff to take her up to the room in a wheelchair, but I didn’t think of it. We were certainly grateful we didn’t have to drive back down to Tucson that night.

I still had a migraine the next day, and there was a lot of wind while we were driving back down to Tucson. I was very happy to get home. But the first thing I saw when I walked in the door was water stains on my leather couch. The roof had been leaking!

We had put in new lights a couple of months ago, and like everything else, they required roof penetrations (as I’ve mentioned before, our ceiling is our roof, so they have to run the electrical lines on top of the roof for anything in the ceiling). One of the new lights was leaking.

I called my contractor and he sent the electrician over. I appreciated the immediate response, but we had barely been home an hour and I was nearly crazy from exhaustion and my migraine. The electrician was in my face, trying to insinuate that it couldn’t be a leak from the lights because the lights were put in 2 months ago and it’s not the first time it has rained in two months. But it is the first time that couch had been in that location. That couch had been in Albuquerque until John brought it out on one of his trips recently. And if there had been a little spot of water on the tile during these past couple of months, I wouldn’t have noticed. I was so irritated with that electrician. I told him three times the couch hadn’t been there for more than a couple of weeks, not two months!

And I had such a migraine. And I still had to pick Biska up from the pet sitters. We finally got settled in, and Tara and I (and Biska) all went to sleep about 7:30 that night, and didn’t get up for about 12 hours! We were all done in!

Meanwhile I had noticed that Biska had a little scratch on the top of her head, and it had gotten much worse because she was scratching at it with her hind foot. So first thing in the morning I went out in search of a cone. PetsMart wasn’t open yet, so I tried Target with no luck, and Walmart with no luck, and had to wait until PetsMart opened. Finally a cone!

Meanwhile, while I was running around looking for a dog cone, the electrician showed up and decided to treat my couch with leather conditioner without even asking me! And the couch wasn’t even fully dried yet! That’s not the right method – it is better to try to work on the edges of the water mark with a damp cloth first, then let it all completely dry, then use leather cleaner, then leather conditioner, applied in even strokes over the entire couch. Instead he was scrubbing hard at one spot and making everything worse. I know he was trying to be helpful, but I was just so mad that he didn’t ask first. And he probably set the stain in with the waxy crap he was rubbing into my still-damp couch.

Now from a distance there’s a big dark area where he applied product – without applying it evenly to the whole couch. I’m just going to have to buy my own product and try to redo it right to save this couch. But first, I just needed my headache to go away!

Meanwhile poor Tara was still really woozy from the pain and the meds, and slept most of Thursday. Finally on Friday things were much better for both of us. Tara felt better, my migraine was gone, and the weather got better too.

Here we are having lunch at the café at the botanical garden. It was the first time Tara had eaten solid food since Monday. She was determined to eat a burger!

This vine was in full bloom at the botanical garden. I didn’t see any identification signs. From a quick internet search, I believe it might be called Hardenbergia. I want some of that in my yard! I could use the February blooms, because I always get February blues.

Things continued to improve on Saturday. Tara and I bought take-out food and went to a very pretty outdoor mall and sat outside and ate by the fountains, murals and bougainvillea vines. I picked up a new iPad I had ordered, and she bought some favorite perfume she couldn’t get near her house, and we had a nice time walking around in the sun.

A hard week turned out well. Whew.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Kristina’s Website: Life Coaching for Adults with Autism