While Not Working

"The trouble with getting better", said BD, "Is that time doesn't pass as quickly. It gets boring." True. There's so many things you can't do after you've been taken apart, had spare parts put in, been re-plumbed, and stitched back together. Can't even lift your cat because you are limited to weights of less than 2kg and your cat is a 4kg chonk. On Monday the surgical big cheese gave approval for a Tuesday discharge on the proviso of walking six laps of the ward in the course of the day, and no untoward misbehaviour of the cardiac variety.  Motivation for walks went up 100% and a seemingly endless parade of people marched through the door, providing education on the myriad of things that needed to be monitored and managed and remembered to ensure the best recovery.  Outside was cold and wet: rain dribbled down the windows.  Cats, proxy or not, like to sit on window sills to watch the weather. A young Welsh nurse with a rich accent and intricate, ...

I don't follow the football.  Despite this, I became aware that the AFL Grand final was on at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, just a stone's throw from where we sat with BD in Hospital World. Out in Football World, the final would play out between the Geelong Cats and the Sydney Swans. State rivalry being what it is, Victorians all elected to support Geelong against the interlopers from interstate. The whole state had a public holiday for the momentous event: random people in the streets proudly paraded Geelong colours; buildings and businesses applied paint, flags, and signs to declare their alliegence; sneaky Geelong posters and badges/caps/scarves were evident throughout the hospital; and there was even an occasional Swan's supporter providing a spot of scarlet in the seas of black and white. Nailing your colours to the mast  door. On Friday there was a parade in which the two teams chugged down the river on punts before being loaded into utes and paraded along streets lin...

We've had a busy couple of days, filled with the kind of shenanigans that are both unavoidable and also not what anyone wants to do. On Monday we helped BD pack her bags for hospital. Her cat did it's best to come too. I could totally fit in there. Unfortunately real cats weren't allowed in hospital, so we had to make do with proxy ones. We accompanied her through the tedious check-in process, resurrected all our bad hospital jokes and black humour, and finally tucked them both in to bed and left for the night. Not as good as a real cat, but it will have to do. On Tuesday we got up way too early in the morning, to the confusion of the dogs, who tried to get excited about the possibility of pre-dawn walks but in the end decided we were quite mad and went back to bed instead. We made it to the hospital in time to wave BD off to la-la land courtesy of some solid pre-surgery medication. We went home and killed time, walked the dogs, went back to hospital, found the ICU and the ...

What started off a year ago as one day/week of work morphed into two days/week last December and in June an uncomfortable third day popped up and just didn't go away and the odd 5-day week arrived in the mix.  Semi-retirement was starting to look a lot like part time work and I didn't like it at all. Well, BD's impending surgery put the brakes on all those work shenanigans:  I've taken a month off and when I come back I intend to return to my 2 day week balanced out by my barely adequate 5 day weekend and that's my plan and I'm sticking to it.  It took all day on Friday but finally all the emails were sent, the phone calls made, the i's and t's dotted and crossed.   Come Saturday morning I hopped on my bicycle and took a little ride in to town to meet Roger and the BD after she finished her shift. I started off along the Nepean Highway, which very considerately provided a service road or bike path on which to ride. I didn't take a photo: imagine a bi...

Life isn't all tea and biccies, unfortunately.  Sometimes even the most dedicated lolly-gaggers have to wo/man up and act like responsible adults. Or parents, as the case may be. In a little over a week the BD will roll up to hospital for surgery. We've been making like hermits because we don't want to get any illnesses that would prevent her from having surgery or us from visiting.  All our isolation is a bit moot really because she continues to work, making face to face contact every day and traveling to and fro with the disease riddled masses on public transport.   Before becoming hermits we took another step to further our cultured credentials and went to ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) to indulge the BD's fascination with film and my parallel interest in photography.  We didn't see anywhere near all of the displays, but what we saw kept us busy and took us down a memory lane of movies and old television shows.   I didn't take a lot of phot...

One year ago today we finally packed our last bits and pieces in our storage shed, farewelled our fridge to a good home, and camped at the Mitchell Weir on the first night of our trip to South Australia.  Since then we've embraced the itinerant life and spent quite a bit of time ping-ponging around between the older and younger generations of our family in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide.  Although how we've ended up living a capital city life when we're both committed country-towners I don't know. Today, on our one-year anniversary of itinerancy, we got up at an unsociable hour and drove to the Epworth Private Hospital where the BD was booked for some tedious but necessary tests and I was along for moral support and chocolate as required. Unsociably early Melbourne. Power lines painted gold by morning sunlight. While the BD and I disappeared into the bowels of Medical Imaging, Roger prowled the suburban streets on a reconnaissance mission, scoping out all the important...