A day in the life

 

A day in the life

Up for morning coffee.  I make breakfast.  Judy, still one-handed, makes breakfast for the dogs.  The dogs stay home, Judy and I pile in the car and head north.  Headphones on, making conversation quiet and easy and we proceed for half an hour past the palm trees in the median that signify we’re in the Valley.  Then through the checkpoint an hour north of our house.  We live north of the border, but to get anywhere outside the Valley in any direction, there is still one more checkpoint to go through.  We’re on the clock, so when the agent asks if we’re U.S. citizens I don’t answer in Spanish this time.  It’s a newly renovated facility there with plenty of resources to pull a car over and check every crevice for contraband.  So far, we haven’t been struck by the inconvenience of detainment there, but there will be plenty more opportunities on future trips.  We pass the Brooks County rest area, that we always send photos of, without stopping this time, but do pull over in Falfurrias for gas.  It’s a right turn from there to cross over from Highway 281 to Highway 77, the two north/south highways that serve way south Texas.  The twenty-mile cross-over section is referred to as Hawk Alley and we see plenty.  Red-tailed hawks, mostly.  Crested Caracaras.  Kestrels.  We see sandhill cranes too, but only a few.  We used to see a big flock of snow geese out in the ranchland fields every winter, but we haven’t seen them for several years now.

 

A left at Riviera to continue north until we hit the interstate and make the right turn to Corpus.  We drive past our destination for the day because we’re early enough to continue on to Snoopys for fish and chips.  It was a wet rainy day, so we sat inside looking out

 

… and happened upon a serendipitous moment.  We were chatting with the guy behind the bar.  He got quiet for a few minutes, and we went back to eating our lunch, then next thing I know, he’s offering me a hand carved strawberry to give to Judy.

 

What a guy; and here he is, the culprit!

 

Another fine lunch.

 

Next, the event of the day, the follow-up visit with the surgeon eleven days after surgery.  Dr Schlimmer gave us a more complete explanation of the surgery.  The rotator cuff didn’t really need any correction but there were a couple fixes to make nonetheless.  There was a lot of scar tissue from previous surgeries, so he released some of the adhesions to make movement more comfortable.  There were a couple old sutures left in a place that would be irritating so he removed them.  He described Judy’s bicep as “unhappy with the tendon”, so he relocated the tendon attachment to a happier place.  The recovery is way ahead of schedule.  Judy has been doing physical therapy for a week; passive movement only.  The doctor released her to full mobility with the exception of the biceps.  No weight bearing biceps curls yet.  Can’t imagine a better report than what we just got.

 

A quiet drive home, except for that truck that turned-over on highway 281 just before we got to our exit.  We didn’t see the accident happen, it was around a couple bends in the road, and would have been a couple of minutes ahead of us.  So we had to sit quietly and visit for a little longer, except now at a standstill so we didn’t need to use the headsets.  The wreck didn’t mess up our day nearly as much as it messed up somebody else’s.

 

The patient’s shoulder now looks like this:

 

Three entry points, and only one of them even visible.  Who would even know she just had surgery, and she complained to the doctor about exactly that.  She said it didn’t look bad enough and she wasn’t getting enough sympathy, poor thing.

 

Well, that’s another day in the life of Steve and Judy.  Tomorrow, we expect the day to happen much closer to home all day.