A Sight for Sore Eyes (and everything else)

It is my first morning home. Even without my noisy roommate my body comes into consciousness at 0311. Sleep was uncomfortable, but, despite the hour, it was better than I expected when I inched and moaned myself into bed.

At 0400 I’ve had enough of my ceiling staring. Sleep has eluded me. I decide to get up, to wheel myself to the guest bathroom and expel my deeply amber urine - I can’t seem to catch up on my fluid intake. I transfer to the toilet, pee the longest pee, and I’m back to the wheelchair. None of this is comfortable. It is all a struggle, this bowling ball of a head, still unsure of where to be.

Out to the living room. The Sweet Wife has the place lit up with all the night lights. I pull one from the nearest wall’s electrical outlet and turn of the lights shining over the counter. I transfer to the recliner, knowing I shouldn’t be here without a protective layer between me and its white fabric. Likely a problem for another day.

This is my life now - a problem for another day - except today is that ‘another day’. It seems like everything has caught up with me and there is nothing to do but do my time.

With the artificial lights off, everything I see is a silhouette, the ombré from the morning’s dawn as the backdrop. All else is black, no detail.

The Sweet Wife is on high alert and gave me strict instructions to wake her up if I got up. It’s like she doesn’t even know me. I sneaked out of our room in my new-to-me wheelchair, making my transfer and subsequent exit as stealthy as my stiff body would allow. It worked. I made it out and she slept. I can only imagine the hours of sleep deprivation she has accumulated over the last week. And so she sleeps thinking I am right next to her. I count this as a small win.

She visits me now, close to 0600, bringing me my meds and a water bottle and anything else she thinks I might need to survive for the next 3 hours while she goes back to sleep. I laugh, but her care of me is not funny. This is serious business. Love like this changes everything.

She’s back in bed. The sprinklers for the back lawn are on and sprinkling our green blades of grass. The robins sing and sing and sing, seeming sentinels of the sun’s arrival. There is no stopping their music. They will sing forever…or at least until dawn is done dawning.

While I was in the hospital, I heard no birds. There were windows, but they didn’t open. If they did, seagulls may have been the sound du jour. Instead, alarms and meal trays and carts and lovenox shots were the sounds to be had. For eight days, I never turned on the TV or watched one video on my phone. I had no desire for these sounds. I wanted the robins. I wanted this sunrise.

And now I have the chirping robins and the sacredness of a morning about to consume me. There is something humbling about these sounds and being witness to what is to come. It seems that I wasn’t supposed to be here and yet, I’m here, breathing and present. Life will be different now. The Sweet Wife will gently hover and I will attempt to sneak places that this wheelchair’s noises might disallow. Even though my legs work, walking is out. I am chair-bound, except when I am in bed. While inconvenient (it’s possible I am understating my current situation), I’m happy to be sitting, to have the chance of walking again. There is more to come and I am lucky or blessed or whatever it is that came together to allow me to be alive for today’s rising of the sun, and whatever is to follow.

In addition to the no walking rule, there is also a now showering rule in place for the next three weeks. It’s as if my nose can imagine my smell in the future, a stench that might make the robins rethink their singing, or at least where they are choosing to sing.

But I am here. I hear the robins going off and I can see the morning coming. I could weep. Maybe I will. This gratitude is ready to overwhelm, is ready to rock me to my core. I am alive, in my front-row wheelchair, for all that is to come.