John Gets His Picture on the Post Office Wall

John is having a new experience - that of having his photo on the Post Office wall. Katherine, our post-mistress, swore to me that she would put it on the Most Wanted Wall, not the FBI Most Wanted wall - a very important distinction. But the Post Office is an important center of information in a town that has no newspaper, in a county that doesn't have a daily newspaper. If you live in town you don't get mail delivery, you have a post office box. When you go to pick up your mail - leaving your car running with the keys in it, of course - you stay a while, talk to folks, and catch up on the news. And get to see John's picture on the wall.

And since he is the world's only perfect man, he's gorgeous.

As of March 18th, he was spending an average of 6 hours a day up in the chair and gaining strength. He can't do anything in a linear fashion, so he had to throw a monkey wrench into things. I came in to see him on Tuesday morning (March 20th), and his left leg was the color of an eggplant. He'd developed a blood clot in a vein. So he was put on anticoagulants and bedrest. He relaxed after I told him that his leg was cool but not cold and he had pulses all the way down it, making this a nuisance but not crisis, and got worked up again when I told him that he'd have to stay in bed for a while. He really likes the chair. The leg looks almost normal now and his pulses are even better, so I hope the chair is in his near future.

In the meantime he's been doing his exercises in bed and the vent weaning is moving right along. Yesterday his trach was changed for a smaller size (which will be more comfortable) and with a disposable inner cannula (easier to keep clean - don't worry if this part makes no sense to you; it's really for the medical folks out there). He's been off antibiotics for a week and is doing fine without them - I think the pneumonia finally bit the dust. It is amazing how much better he looks and feels. Today we watched the UK game together and had a wonderful time. This is the first time in the tournament that he's felt like staying awake and focused for the whole game.  

So when you come to Topeka to see all the sights - both of them - be sure to stop by the Post Office and take a look at John's picture on the wall. He's gorgeous!

About that cow . . .

I've been transplanted. I grew up in Atlanta, and somehow landed in small-town Indiana. Very small. Smaller than my high school. I love it here and have asked my husband to promise me we'll never again live in a town big enough to have stoplights. But there were some adjustments. For one thing, I'd always had anonymity, so for 2 years I had nightmares about going to the post office naked. But about the cow . . .

We live on the edge of town - which means almost in the center of it - with an Amish farm to the east and an English (i.e., non-Amish) farm to the south. There are lots of horses, some hens and pigs, and cows. Occasionally you see a cow wandering around in the street somewhere. When I was a child, I do not remember ever looking out the window of my father's highrise office building and seeing, way down there, a Holstein wandering down Peachtree Street. So this was new to me. But it could startle even the natives. Finally, about that cow . . .

Early one Sunday morning Mertice woke up across the street from us, got her cup of coffee, and opened the front door. Looking out, she was eye-to-eye with a cow. It was standing on her front porch, calmly looking at her through the storm door. Mertice yelled for DeWayne that there was a cow on the porch. DeWayne, understandably, thought this was an exageration of some sort. Coming to see for himself, he discovered the literal truth - there was a cow on the porch. DeWayne never gets excited about anything, certainly not livestock. He calmly got a rope out of the garage, looped in around the Holstein's neck, looked at its brand, and walked it back home.

There's no particular moral to this story, except maybe that you should keep a length of rope in your garage. But the incident stands out in my mind as one of those times I was startled into asking myself, "Where am I, and how on earth did I get here?" Besides moving me to admiration of DeWayne's calm competence, the morning is symbolic of my time here. Some day when I'm in a nursing home with the last staged of dememtia, I'll be muttering about that cow.