Henry, who will be a college freshman in two months and I assume we’re all just going to let that happen, is running a book club this summer, as part of his “Do I want to be an underpaid English teacher or don’t I?” journey. The book club membership consists of four of Henry’s friends, plus it originally included four members of Henry’s household. But now Elizabeth has unexpectedly gone away for the summer to be a camp counselor (it is a Christian camp, and she knows this worries me, so she is sending texts such as: “I love my supervisor. Not to alarm anyone, but if she handed me Kool-Aid that would bring me to Heaven’s gate, I would drink it”), and she is on-duty 23 hours out of 24 (though not paid accordingly: the Lord’s work does not even APPROXIMATE fair wages, since presumably the Lord’s followers can readily subsist on manna collected each day from the morning’s dew), so now the book club contains only three of Henry’s household: William, Edward, and me. And actually Edward is participating in what Henry calls “remedial book club,” because Edward wants to read SOME books but not as many as Henry thinks we ought to read. My own opinion is that Edward is right and that Henry’s syllabus is far, FAR too ambitious, but this is how English majors learn what is reasonable before they turn into English teachers.

Anyway, we started with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I thought I had read in my youth but it soon became clear I had not. Goodness. And I never DID become inured to the casual use of the n-word, nor to the absolute PREPONDERANCE of male characters. But then we got to the part where Huck dresses up like a girl, and an older woman figures him right out because he catches a tossed ball of yarn by closing his knees instead of opening them, and I remembered that vividly! …Though I’d remembered it came from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or possibly from a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. So my guess is that either there was a suspiciously similar scene in Tom Sawyer / Laura Ingalls Wilder, or else that scene was in one of those English-class collections that includes poems, essays, and excerpts from novels, and I read it there.

Our second book is Pride & Prejudice, which, well! I have read it multiple times, I own the annotated version which I highly recommend and am using for this re-read, and I have many evolving opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the various TV/movie adaptations. It is HUGELY enjoyable for me to re-read it for a group project, and to hear the kids using “Mrs. Bennett” as an insult.

An aside: I told Henry that I would like to provide copies of the book for the book club, on a book-by-book basis: that is, let’s start with one round and make no promises and see how it goes. My working philosophy was that I would not buy from Amazon, and instead I would buy from Goodwill/eBay, where we can liberate used copies from the landfill!!!! Except I ordered eight matching “like-new” copies of the same edition (we want to be able to reference page numbers), and I received the most amazing hodge-podge of absolutely-in-NO-way-“like-new” books, which included highlighting, rips, entirely different editions, crumpled covers, water damage, a large patch of sticky residue, teachers’/schools’/libraries’ stamps/stickers, etc. Contacting the sellers resulted in a shrug: return them, if you want. But it was too late to do so before the book club began, so we breathed carefully and tried to use the situation as an opportunity to practice using perspective.

For Pride & Prejudice, we ordered from Amazon. I didn’t like it, but Henry’s overambitious reading schedule is tight, and we could get brand-new copies delivered the next day for less than the price of battered/unknown copies on eBay that would arrive a week and a half after we were supposed to start reading. For the next book (The Three Musketeers) we tried again to be responsible consumers, but once again we were too late: even thinking relatively far ahead, eBay copies wouldn’t get here for ten days or more, AND those battered used copies would cost more than brand-new, so we ordered again from Amazon. But the NEXT book after THAT is Jane Eyre, and we have some time because we are thinking SO SO far ahead, so we have ordered “very good” (i.e., undoubtedly stickered/stained/highlighted/underlined/ex-library/torn/water-damaged beyond reason) copies from eBay that will take two weeks to get here.

Let’s say that, when someone you know (or the loved one of someone you know) dies, you like to send a donation to the charity mentioned in their obituary. What do you do if the charity they mention is one you actively don’t want to support?

I am in this situation right this minute. Paul’s elderly uncle-by-marriage has died, and Paul’s elderly aunt (special to me) survives. The uncle and aunt were residents of a nursing home which has stripped them of all their assets, not necessarily by fault of the nursing home, but by fault of the system which is set up to squeeze all assets from old people. The obituary says that memorial donations can be made to the nursing home. Our understanding is that “posting the obituary” is a service the nursing home provides, and that it’s the nursing home that has listed themselves as the preferred recipient of donations. We don’t know this for sure; we are not going to ask the grieving elderly aunt if this is the case; we don’t want to give more money to this particular system; please take these as the boundaries of this particular puzzle.

Because it could just as easily have happened that the obituary would suggest that donations could be made to a church with views we actively don’t want to support. Or could have suggested we make a donation to a consignment-sales organization whose anti-LGBTQ mission we don’t want to support. Or could have suggested we make a donation to ANY particular organization we are not willing to give money to. What THEN, is what I am wondering. How do you send a symbolic sympathy gift THEN?

One option is that we could do what people do when the obituary doesn’t suggest a charity, and we could make a donation to WHATEVER organization we think is a good one, among those organizations we think the deceased/survivors would also support. That is what started the obituary-charity-suggestion thing, I’m guessing: someone would die, and people would make a lot of donations in that person’s name to various charities, and after awhile it occurred to relatives that it would be a good idea to DIRECT those donations to a PARTICULAR charity. I do worry a little about Guessing Wrong, but there are so many relatively unobjectionable charities—animal shelters and world hunger organizations and so forth.

Another option is that we could just donate to the charity mentioned anyway, even if we don’t support it. I’m not a fan of this option, but I want us all to know I am aware of it, so that no one feels the need to suggest it. Perhaps we could all think for a moment about an organization we are opposed to, and then imagine “just” donating to it “anyway.” Nah, right? Nah.

A third option is that we could skip the donation, and send flowers. [A few comments make a good point about not sending flowers if the obituary says “in lieu of flowers…,” which I agree with, and in those cases I wouldn’t be considering sending flowers; this obituary did not say “in lieu of flowers.”] I feel like this is a perfectly acceptable option, but a waste of potentially-charitably-useful money in a situation where the bereaved will be receiving a lot of flowers they will have no place for. But it’s not a terrible option. I’m okay with sentimental/symbolic/decorative wastefulness. And I feel like I could make it work a little better by sending the flowers, say, on the one-month anniversary of the death. This seems like a particularly good option for the particular case I am currently considering, where emotional/still-thinking-of-you-and-here’s-something-decorative-to-show-it support might be more valuable.

A fourth option is that we could do a Caring Gift—we’re distant in this particular case, but if the recipient were local this would be like bringing over a casserole, or a bag of yogurt/juice/muffins, or a cake, or whatever. For a distant recipient, it could be sending food or…I don’t actually know what the options would be for someone in a nursing home. But the gist is that we could send something not related to what the obituary suggests, but also not flowers. Honestly in this particular case I can think of nothing, but in the past I have sent batches of cookies/brownies, or have had companies send food.

I am wondering what YOU do in this kind of situation, or what you think you WOULD do (if you haven’t had to deal with this before).

I am having a very busy time of life right now: four kids at home; kid graduating high school; kid dealing with college decisions and orientation and needing to acquire supplies; kid finally going for their driver’s license; kid getting job at a summer camp and needing to acquire supplies; three kid birthdays in less than two weeks. All GOOD things, and yet I am not coping particularly well, I notice: lots of the BAD stress feelings.

I suspect it’s that the baseline stress right now with what’s going on in the country is SO BAD, that any busyness or excitement added INTO that stress just exhibits as More Negative Stress. I also think there’s a tipping point: everything can be WONDERFUL, but we can still handle only so many happy tasks in a day before we start to feel batty-eyed.

Additionally, things are not going well at my job right now. We’ve all been clinging on for dear life the last year or two, waiting for a new person in the top position, while an unqualified and inexperienced temporary replacement steers us wildly into one storm after another. The new person was found; the new person seems GREAT—and the new person is continuing to allow the temporary replacement to run everything. The new person’s philosophy is admirable: don’t show up and start changing things without first assessing the situation and getting a clear picture of how things are and how they should change. But it’s been almost six months, and the new person spends all their time in meetings off-site or behind a closed office door, so I don’t see how the new person is getting any sort of feel for how things are on the active floor—and, as I say, so far the new person is allowing the unqualified person to continue to steer us poorly/wildly. This too is keeping baseline stress levels higher and making it difficult for the HAPPY kind of busyness to feel happy.

Normally you know I love almost nothing more than shopping for college, shopping for a birthday, shopping for a new baby (there is a new baby in our extended family)—and instead it all feels like more urgent tasks to be checked off a list. Choosing wee footie sleepers, which is a rare treat and should be enjoyed for as long as possible, had to be RUSHED. And it doesn’t help that I am trying to avoid shopping at Target, trying to avoid Amazon. I will say that this past week (shopping for the twins’ birthdays after an unsuccessful experience shopping small for Henry’s birthday; shopping for a kid who suddenly got a summer-camp job that starts this weekend; shopping for a new baby) I have just gone ahead and used Amazon: sure, it’s run by an evil oligarch who supports our current terrible administration, but they have what I need and they will get it to me quickly. I know small businesses can’t compete with that, so I will not ask them to. (Target may be a lesser evil, but I care more about them feeling my timely wrath.)

This weekend is a busy one for many of us. I hope you all stay safe.

A few weeks ago I flew in an airplane (my brother and I went to see our parents) and the airplane did not crash, which was a fresh relief in light of the recent scary stories about the gutting of the FAA. I know it’s safer to fly than drive, blah blah blah, but what gave me actual comfort was the stories of airports briefly closing because the people there felt it was not safe to direct air traffic. It made it seem as if the people in charge might not just be shrugging and saying “What can we do? We don’t have the necessary staff but we have to keep flying planes anyway or we’ll lose money!”

We flew Delta, and they pissed me off yet again, by changing the flight schedule literally the day after we booked the flights, to something I would not have booked if it had been that way to begin with. It was fine, it was fine, but it added roughly four hours of waiting-in-airports time, and two of those hours were because my last flight landed 15 minutes before the bus for home departed (instead of landing, perfectly, 45 minutes before the bus departed, as originally scheduled), and I had to wait two hours for the next bus because now we were on the Evening Schedule with buses spaced further apart. That was frustrating, to be so close to home and yet still be sitting in an airport. But it was fine. I played my little phone games.

For Henry’s birthday, I tried to avoid shopping at Amazon or Target. I shopped two weeks in advance, because I know I have gotten accustomed to 2-day and 3-day shipping and that smaller places can’t do that. I braced myself for things to cost more, and they did indeed cost more. I ordered things that were scheduled to arrive in time for the birthday. None of them are in fact arriving in time for the birthday. I am finding this very frustrating. I shopped small! I supported the little guy! I spent more time and money! Shouldn’t I have earned Good Shopping Karma for this? Why am I instead being punished.

Elizabeth and I had Her Big College Talk. The gist is that she feels that Illustration is not the right major for her. It’s difficult, because she is not only good at it but better at it than many of her peers, and it would be worth a shot at being one of the few who ends up working in the field. But she has picked up from her professors and peers that the life of someone successfully working in illustration is a life of hustle and self-promotion and self-bossing. Her fellow art students are excited about this: being their own boss! working on their own terms! But it fills Elizabeth with dread. She wants to work regular hours, and have a boss and health benefits. She had thought Illustration would put her in the position to be doing art the way she wants to do art, which is filling someone else’s request; she had not realized she would not be able to do that work in an office with a regular paycheck.

Possibly you are about to tell us about digital/graphic artists, or people who work in marketing. This has also been addressed and discussed: she doesn’t like to do digital/graphic art, and she doesn’t want to work a career that is about selling a product or making money for the sake of making money. This narrows her artistic options significantly.

I was all set to encourage her to keep going with art: it’s what she likes to do, and she’s good at it, and she can’t think of anything else she wants to do. Her wavering reminded me of people who write to the baby name blog during postpartum, worried they’ve chosen the wrong name for their baby—but they don’t have another name in mind, or any particular reason to jettison the name they’ve chosen. There is a type of uncertainty that is just uncertainty, and doesn’t mean anything needs to change, and I’d thought that was what Elizabeth and I were going to be discussing. But it sounds to me like she has a more legitimate reason to consider a change: she does not feel she is suited for the type of working she would be doing—and, whether or not she’d be suited to it, she doesn’t want to do it. So then what.

One possibility is teaching. Regular hours, in some sense (I am the daughter of a teacher, so I already know about the after-hours grading/etc., but so does Elizabeth, and this falls within her definition of regular hours). Health benefits. Going IN to work, not working from home. Working for something that feels meaningful/important/community, as opposed to something designed to create money. People say things like “Oh, but teaching is so different now! / the administration! / the parents! / the lack of respect! / etc.!”—but one of my coworkers who worked in a school for years says that in her experience, newer teachers don’t struggle with this the way older teachers do, because newer teachers come into it as it is, rather than comparing it to how it used to be.

People also say it is hard to find art-teacher jobs, and that they don’t pay well, and that art is one of the departments a lot of schools are cutting—but this starts to make me wonder what ANYONE is supposed to major in, if it has to be something that results in a high-paying, easily-findable job we will always need. I was a business major, and I know about supply and demand, and that is not how it works: if there even EXISTS a job that is high-paying and easy to get, it will not stay that way. I suppose “low-paying and hard to get” is not ideal, either, but teaching falls within my own understanding of a reasonable wage. It’s not what doctors and lawyers and engineers earn, but you can make a life with it. And currently most schools DO have an art teacher, and those art teachers are mortal. And if someone wants a job with meaning/importance/community elements, rather than a job that generates money, that job is going to come with a lower income.

But, after saying all that: I am not sure Elizabeth is actually interested in teaching. And also: we are having a surprising amount of trouble figuring out how it WORKS to get a teaching degree. When I was in school, both elementary ed (grades K-6) and secondary ed (grades 5-12) were 4-year bachelor’s degrees, but when I look online at various schools, I’m seeing confusing offerings of some 4-year and some 5-year degrees, some bachelor’s and some master’s, and I’m surprised at how difficult it is to figure out what is what. Also, one school mentioned that all their teaching degrees are nationally accredited, and claimed that only 30% of the teaching degrees at U.S. colleges are nationally accredited—so maybe the degrees at my college were inferior in some way, and that’s why they were only 4-year bachelor’s degrees (…though, my classmates went on to get teaching jobs). I’m also puzzled by the way a particular school will offer, for example, secondary ed degrees in history, math, music, and English, but not in science or French/Spanish or art. Elizabeth and I spent an hour or two on our computers, both working on the question “HOW DO I GET A TEACHING DEGREE IN ART?,” and we were not able to get an answer to that question before giving up in frustration.

Anyway, we are not sure what her next step will be. She might continue in Illustration for now—though, she’s at the halfway point, so she is reluctant to continue with a path that feels Wrong. She might take a semester or a year off—though she finds she strongly dislikes this idea. She might take a class or two in education and see what she thinks. It’s very hard to know what is the right thing to do. Her main summer project is Trying To Figure This Out. We have been trying out aptitude/career tests online, and mine say I should be a library assistant or a pharmacy technician, but that’s because I gravitate to what I already know I can do; Elizabeth’s results lean toward engineering/science/analyst jobs, because that’s what she wishes she wanted to do.

Elizabeth’s birthday is coming up, and she has asked for “Assorted pretty little hair clippies. I’ve been using bobby pins in my hair and I want something a little cuter. My vague idea is, ‘you know, like in the 90s!’ But not like bright pink and yellow butterfly clips 90s, more like dark and sparkly and mostly-neutral lil’ guys 90s.”

I was a Young Person in the ’90s, and I remember there were two basic fashion paths for girls: one path involved short skirts, baby-doll shirts, choker necklaces, and hair clippies; the other path involved jeans, flannel shirts unbuttoned over t-shirts, and work boots. Your Swistle admired both paths, but was personally Path #2. And I have a high forehead, and wore/wear glasses and multiple pairs of earrings, and so on me hair clippies always felt like, in the words of Mitch Hedberg, “a lot of cranium accessories.”

Elizabeth is growing her hair out from a velour-like cut, and it is now getting long enough to get into her eyes, almost but not quite long enough to tuck behind her ears. Thus the request—which I feel ill-equipped to address. I suspect she wants whatever clippies were worn by the girls who went Path #1 PLUS wore Docs and that dark merlot lipstick. Or maybe she is thinking of something else?? My hope is that some of you remember well what little hair accessories were used back then, and/or that you have kids who are in on this same retro/throwback trend and you know JUST where I need to shop. This feels like such a tall order, but you have surprised me again and again with this sort of thing, and it emboldens me to keep asking.

Speaking of the twins, we have Edward’s second-year grades. I would say they are a little depressing (to me). However, the academic probation has been lifted, and the scholarships have not been taken away for next year, as far as we can tell. It’s possible there will be an unpleasant surprise when the bill comes in August—but Edward researched it pretty carefully, and read aloud the pertinent sections, and it SOUNDS as if everything will be okay, financially.

That still leaves the question of whether it is okay to keep going to school and getting such iffy (to me) grades; I don’t know how to make that decision—and I guess I’m not really looking for advice, exactly, though would actively welcome commiseration and thought processes from other parents going through the same thing. The grades are passing grades, so it makes me think of that joke about what do you call the student who graduates medical school with the lowest GPA? (“Doctor.”) Edward says the school still feels like the right fit and so does the major, despite the outcomes saying otherwise (to me). We talked a little about why the grades are iffy, and Edward said some (good, promising, concrete) things about figuring out a studying style and also about figuring out how to keep track of things that are due. I asked about using the student services department that provides help/support for those very things, and Edward will look into it in the fall. I also remarked hand-wringingly that it seems like if, for example, a student is getting a 70% in a class, they may be missing 30% of the education they’re paying for, and Edward said amicably, “Yes, Mother.”

Have you watched Severance? We watched the first two seasons, and then the twins came home from college and they’d both watched only the first season, so we’re re-watching the second season now with them. I’m finding it riveting and distracting: lots to think about when not watching it.

Oh! And I just finished a book and I wonder if you might like it. It’s The Wedding People, by Alison Espach (Amazon link, Target link). I would say it was fun without being lightweight.

(image from Target.com)

I built the links/image the way I usually do, but this is the first time I’ve done that since finding out various bad things about Target: first, that they absolutely tripped over their own feet rushing to pre-comply with the new U.S. president’s executive suggestion about eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion; second, that they donated a million dollars to that same president’s “inauguration fund,” and that it was the first time they’d made that sort of donation.

This leaves me in a bit of a pickle, as Target is where I do a LOT of my shopping—and I USED to feel good about shopping there instead of at Walmart or on Amazon. Now I am not sure what to do. I am reevaluating my other shopping options. For example, our grocery store sells toilet paper and shampoo and toothpaste, so I can get those there, and I am willing to pay a little more (and have a more limited selection) to feel on firmer ethical ground. And I look for used books on eBay; sometimes the sale even claims to benefit a charity.

But there are some things that are MUCH more expensive to buy at places that are not Amazon/Target/Walmart, without the place itself seeming like an obviously better choice, and I don’t know what to do about those. I can pay $11 instead of $6 at a chain drugstore; is that an ethical improvement? One of the kids got a little lofty about it, saying “we” “had to” be willing to pay “a little more,” and I was like, child, there is only so much money to work with here, and only a limited selection of sellers. We can fuss at each other about Ethical Stands, and hurt our own budgets over Possibly Slightly More Ethical Shopping Choices, without a single CEO feeling a single mild scolding, let alone a significant economic impact.

But that doesn’t change the fact that shopping at Target makes me feel bad now, so I’m continuing to explore.

We have been procrastinating on this for over a year, so it would be wrong to say it was ONLY because of the impending tariffs—but last summer we had two cars for six drivers, and that was not great, especially if we expect the kids to work summer jobs, which we do; so we’ve been meaning to buy a third car, but haven’t been doing it, and I’ve been feeling increasingly anxious about it, ESPECIALLY with the impending tariffs. And also because one of our two cars is 15 years old with nearing 150,000 miles on it, and that is the sort of situation where one sudden bright day there is a repair that costs more than the car is worth. So if anything we should be adding TWO cars.

Then one evening last week, I suddenly felt a little lift of motivation and capability. I have learned to SEIZE these moments when they occur, but it was like 9:00 at night, so I had to wait to see if it would still be there in the morning, and it WAS, and I went out and bought a used car. It’s a Subaru Outback, with roughly 45,000 miles on it. I went to work the next day and my co-worker who has a Subaru Outback spent like 15 minutes telling me everything that has gone wrong with hers. I HAVE ALREADY SIGNED THE PAPERWORK AND INFORMED MY INSURANCE, IT IS TOO LATE TO TELL ME THESE THINGS.

And anyway, I am already fond of the car. (You might think I would be someone who would give cars names, but I don’t. I do talk to them, and pat them lovingly, and thank them, and reassure them.) I test-drove a Crosstrek, which is what my heart originally wanted, and an Outback, which is what the salesperson knew right away I would end up choosing. The Crosstrek is adorable, and I am not a small person, and we are still regularly transporting things to and from college dorm rooms. The Outback is less cute, but gave me some of the feeling of my beloved Toyota Sienna minivan, which we bought used when I was pregnant with the twins; the Outback isn’t a minivan and doesn’t have a third row of seating, but it felt similar to drive.

The color is grey, which was not at the top of my list and not at the bottom. It’s fine. And the thing is, I always THINK I want a fun color, but what I ACTUALLY want is to blend in, and not have other people be able to tell at a glance that it’s my car. I bought cute license-plate frames, and I put on an equality sticker; I will add more stickers when I’ve decided what I want. It seems like we’re not doing bees-as-symbols-of-resistance this time around, is that your impression as well?

And can we share notes on what else we are supposed to be buying ahead of tariffs and other economic collapses? I have heard mostly coffee and baking chocolate and spices and vanilla.

Okay. Okay. I call uncle: I need some pajama-like pants that I can wear in the daytime, in public.

Even back in December/January with knee surgery and physical therapy looming, I thought I could get by with my patterned flannel pajama pants: it’s short-term! no sense buying special/new clothes when my Christmas Dogs pj pants will do just fine! I can tolerate looking a little silly in a medical situation!

But it’s been three and a half months, and today I had an MRI for my knee (because it’s been over three weeks since I fell on it, and it is still swollen/stiff/sore), and they wanted me to wear soft pants with no zipper, and apparently I have hit my own personal limit for Christmas Dogs pj pants in public. I mean, I did wear the Christmas Dogs pj pants. BUT I WISHED FOR SOMETHING BETTER.

I have a pair of pants a friend gave me, stretchy and black and perfect with pockets, as a surgery-recovery gift—but they were originally one size below what I normally wear (though, bless them, they still worked at the time), and I have gained about 15 pounds since then (she remarked with absolute neutrality, and with no moral value assigned), so now they are a literal and figurative stretch. I looked into buying the same ones in a bigger size—but as seems to be the case with all such quests, the pants have been discontinued.

I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I’d thought I would look All Wrong in basic tight-all-the-way-down stretch pants, so I bought some boot-cut yoga pants, and I felt as if I would FAR rather wear the Christmas Dogs. Specifically they looked wrong with my SHOES, which are either Converse or Skechers. But I didn’t know what kind of shoes WOULD look right with those pants. They made me feel as if I looked ridiculous, so I sent them back to hell where they belonged.

So I guess I am asking: what comfy stretchy non-jeans no-zipper pants OF ANY TYPE (BUT THEY MUST MUST MUST HAVE GOOD POCKETS OR THEY ARE USELESS AS DAYTIME PANTS) do you feel okay wearing in public? And then I will go look at all your suggestions and see if anything resonates. Love you byeeeeeeee!

Shortly after I wrote to you about my little knee setback, in which I fell on my surgical knee and needed seven stitches, three x-rays, and a tetanus shot, and found myself feeling discouraged, fragile, and old, I came down with a cold. For the first five days or so, it was the kind of cold that sounds bad but feels fine. Then it turned into the kind of cold where I went to Urgent Care because it was hard to swallow and seemed like my body was trying to cough up my esophagus, but unfortunately it is not strep or pneumonia or anything else that can be treated; instead it is just a virus, and I can try saltwater gargles, extra liquids, and plenty rest. Meanwhile at night I am thinking things like “I can see how people die of respiratory viruses,” followed by a little flutter of hope.

This, combined with the significant knee-recovery setback, combined with the absolutely execrable U.S. government and its daily doses of excrement, has led me into a bit of a Misery Era. I suggest we don’t talk about me any further than that, not even to the point of sympathetic comments in the comments section; you have already been so kind to me, and I continue to coast on the residuals. Instead, I would like to offer you a place to talk about the things making you miserable right now—few or many, small or medium or large. I think there is a time for gratitude journals and counting blessings and doing what we can with what we have, and there is a time for bonding through restorative complaining.

I have had a little Knee Setback. (Is this now a Knee Blog? Will there ever be a day when we talk about anything other than The Knee?) Today I am 11 weeks post-surgery, and yesterday I did one of the only things the surgeon told me not to do, which was to fall on the knee. I can’t even quite say how it happened, because to me it seemed like I was just suddenly hitting the hardwood floor, first with the knee, then with my cheekbone. There was that Bad Feeling of when something theoretically avoidable has happened and you can’t undo it and now there are going to be a long series of consequences—like when a child barfs in the car, or when you drop a full cup of cranberry juice and it goes EVERYWHERE. Plus I was a little stunned. What just happened? Did I not even try to catch myself with my hands? (This morning there was a big bruise on the outer/back edge of my left hand.) I do fall relatively often for an adult, but I don’t think I have hit my FACE in a fall since childhood.

William was home, and called out from the other room “Are you okay?,” and I said that I was, but that I had fallen. I got up, thinking about how the surgeon had said that if I fell, I should go to the ER to have the knee checked out. I wondered if that still applied 11 weeks later, or if that was just for the immediate post-surgical time. As I wondered that, I noticed my pant leg was wet. I have fallen many, many, MANY times in my life, and I have skinned many a knee, and there has never been this much blood this quickly. There was a cut across the top of the knee, perpendicular to the incision scar. The pants I was wearing were not torn or damaged. I still don’t know how/why the cut happened.

I had just made some lunch, after being away from the house for six hours for work and for physical therapy, and I was also feeling stunned and dismayed and embarrassed and very uncertain what to do, so I took a big chunk of folded paper towels and pressed it against my knee, and propped my leg up on a chair, and said that the plan was to eat my lunch while the bleeding stopped, after which I would call the surgeon’s office and find out if I was seriously supposed to go to the ER for this.

I ate about a quarter of my lunch but I’d lost my appetite. And the bleeding was not stopping. William was nervous and asking if he should drive me to the ER. I thought I could drive myself, until I stood up and the bleeding was much worse. So he drove me to the emergency room. There must be a button they can push at reception for a bleeder, because someone from triage came right out, asked me good-naturedly if I was bleeding on her carpet, and put a 2-inch-thick pile of gauze on my knee and wrapped it with that stretchy elastic stuff that sticks to itself but not to your skin. I am not exaggerating how thick the stack of gauze was.

She then brought me right into triage as soon as I was done checking in, which made me think they were not busy, but I was wrong: this was my first visit to the ER where I spent the whole time in the hallway because every room was full. Because my situation was NOT dire and I was NOT miserable, this was splendid: I got to hear lots of interesting little tidbits about other people and their situations. I was right between TWO nurse telephones, so I heard them describing all sorts of things to their colleagues in this and other hospitals. I was in a cluster of four hallway patients, so I heard their nurses/doctors talking to them about what their issues were. More patients were escorted by police officers than I’d expected. I played on my phone and tried to act like I wasn’t listening.

A nurse brought me an ice pack and a blanket. A PA (physician’s assistant) came by to ask me what brought me here today, and I told her, and she said the plan was (1) x-rays; (2) waiting for a radiologist to assess the x-rays; (3) stitches; (4) possibly a tetanus shot, if my records showed it had been awhile since my last tetanus shot. And those are the four things we did. It took about four hours.

I had never had stitches while awake before. Oh, I guess I had them after my c-sections, but at the time I could not feel a single thing below my ribs so those don’t count. The PA said the worse part would be the three lidocaine shots I’d have before the stitching, and she said those WOULD hurt quite a bit going in—but happily those were done on the part of my knee that is still numb from the knee surgery! I hardly felt them! The stitching itself was conceptually icky, but not painful; I got 7 stitches, which is a pleasing number. The tetanus shot was pretty painful as arm-shots go, but was over quickly and then didn’t keep hurting, though my arm is somewhat sore today.

I had thought that the stitches would pretty much put an end to the bleeding, but that was not the case. I’d thought that once I’d gone to bed and woken up in the morning, THEN the bleeding would have stopped, and that seemed to be the case, but then I went to work and that definitely made things worse, and I left after a couple of hours when the thick bandage failed to be sufficient. I am now trying more advanced resting, to see if I can make it stop, and I think it has mostly worked, but I also think it’s a difficult location for that. My knee is pretty swollen again now, and purple again. There are unpleasant intermittent burning/stinging/zinging sensations on my skin, not where the stitches are but on other parts of the knee.

I am trying not to worry about literally everything about this. I am trying not to project doom into the future (“I guess I am going to be the kind of old person who lightly jostles against a chair and ends up covered in bruises”/”Maybe these are the first indications of what will turn out to be a blood-clotting disorder”/”Is my skin weirdly fragile and breakable now?”/”I am going to be put in A Home so much earlier because of this falling thing”). My whole leg was purple and swollen after the knee surgery, to the point where the visiting home physical therapist was quietly alarmed and got on the phone to the surgeon’s office, and the surgeon was just like “Yep, that happens sometimes,” and indeed the purple gradually cleared itself away. Probably I should take one of my leftover painkillers (NO I did not get rid of them responsibly) and try not to think about it.

Oh! And I should say that the x-rays showed the new $58,000 knee (our co-pay was $180) was just fine. Everything where it should be, no sign of injury or misalignment. “Unremarkable left knee,” was the conclusion. I am trying not to imagine that my knee feels weird or that I’m walking weird or that things are hitching a little with each step (“Maybe I slammed something out of alignment and now it will have to be taken out and replaced”/”Maybe the surgeon will have to do another surgery to adjust it”/”Maybe he will need to adjust it from the outside and it will be very painful and icky”).