On grief and MRI results
Wednesday, June 14, 2023 9:15pm
It's my baby's birthday today. She's one.
Her Auntie Nora is visiting from Tennessee this weeek, and they are currently watching ...Ru Paul's Drag Race? with her other mom in the livingroom. I am sitting alone in the kitchen with the remains of Larb Thai dinner and my thoughts on grief and injury.
I handed her off a few minutes ago when she spotted the black cat image on Dr Kelsey's CleanPro cat kibble bag tucked up in the top shelf of our pantry and got all excited, thinking it was our black cat Catapult, who passed away three weeks and two days ago. "Cat! Cat!" she chirped, insisting that I carry her into the alcove. When she realized it was just another photo, the tone of her voice changed. "Cat..." she said, reaching her chubby little fingers longingly toward the picture, and then her hand changed course midstream, distracted by the enormous box of brown rice Crunchy Rollers on the same shelf.
I whisk her into the other room before she can decide that she needs a sweet treat at bedtime, and because I desperately need a few minutes alone with my own sadness. I wanted so much more time with Catapult. Another five years, at least. I wanted him to pull through like he'd survived so many fights, cat bite abscesses, that bilateral hip displacement in his first year when he was probably hit by a car because we lived on Dwight Way (one of the busier thoroughfares of Berkeley), living with us for almost a year in a motorhome with a cat door installed in its rear entrance, and most recently, an inner ear infection that caused him to stagger when standing up misdiagnosed as idiopathic seizures.
I always think there will be more time. Isn't that the truth. But isn't that proof of a good life, good living? Enjoying each other's company, and wishing that this present could stretch a bit further toward forever.
I've been in that blessed state an entire year today. Waking in the middle of the night to the wild elation and wist that I have a daughter, and a loving spouse to coparent her with, I am grateful that we have a stable roof over our heads and work that I love which does not wreck my body or my soul, good health and good company, and all surmountable problems.
All of this is true, even though the wisting no longer makes me weep. I'm strung too tight tonight for tears, though my beloved has been crying on and off all day, like a partly cloudy day with showers, because she is reckoning with the consequences of a moment's inattention. She hit an open door on her bicycle six days ago, and we got the MRI results today. She has three full-thickness ligament tears that will almost certainly require surgery, and a possible impact fracture on the top of her shinbone (posterior lateral tibial plateau) which the initial x-ray we got on the first day didn't reveal.
I've been rubbing fresh ginger steeped in white vinegar (overnight on our Mr Coffee beverage warmer covered in animal stickers that we call "the zoo") and feeding her shots of Yunnan Baiyao and warm water and her contusions are maturing nicely to an almost turmeric yellow, the swelling is much better today, but the one practitioner I know who might be able to give a second opinion on whether she really needs surgery is on vacation until early August and I'm not sure that she can do anything about full-thickness ACL/MCL/patello-femoral tears.
And now it is 9:50 and my excellent child has come to ask me to nurse her to sleep so I'm going to bed with her.
