Saturday, July 13, 2019

The Curveballs

A few things have happened. First, I forgot to remind myself that I'm not free in the summers, but rather that I'm "doing a different job." I remembered this important distinction in advance last year, and I was the happier for it. This year, when I was running down the clock on the school year, I imagined myself in summer mode, making amazing progress on my second novel, cranking out impressive word counts and revising like a boss. I forgot about the minivan taxi service and the million hopes and dreams of everyone else in my household that rest of my very shoulders.

The bottom line: summer is always good, but it's not a vacation.

A second, quite significant curveball arrived on our home plate last Monday. Dan had emergency surgery for a detached retina. I didn't know much about this, but the deal is, if your retina detaches, you need to get it surgically reattached to the surrounding tissues right away. And then you need to hold it in place while it heals. This is the tricky part. Depending on where the tear is, that determines the position in which you must hold your head for a significant period of time to let the gas bubble the doctor puts in there apply pressure to the reattachment site. I might be explaining this wrong, but you get the gist.

Here's the bottom line: Dan has to lie still on his right side for at least seven days with very few breaks. He's deeply unhappy, as any of us in this situation would be. But one has to do it. If you don't do it, you might lose your vision. So, the whole thing has wicked high stakes.

The third curveball is that I just discovered I might be double-paying for my NYTimes subscription. That's probably the least significant of the three. It probably doesn't require any more explanation.

3 comments:

jdoc said...

Oh. The retina detachment sounds miserable. Good luck to Dan. And everyone, of course.

KC said...

I just wanted to update that the recovery will be 14 days instead of 7. This might require its own blog post.

LH said...

Wow. I live in fear of detached retina. I got a slight hole in my retina a few years ago, but not the whole shebang.

I hope Dan is staying very very still. Maybe he can listen to White Lies, a great podcast I just listened too.