It’s hard to believe
I have been back here in Oregon a week. It definitely has been both familiar
and peculiar. As I said in my blog entry about my trip to Stratford University,
everything is familiar and easy compared to India. That is even truer here in
Oregon in the very neighbourhood in which we spent over a decade. It is also
more peculiar: owning a house but not staying there; going to that house to
turn on the automatic sprinkler system and wandering through the yard and empty
house; trying to stay connected at work when the people with whom I need to
interact are 12.5 hours and half a world away.
Let’s start with the
most important thing: Rae seems to be 100% at this point. There is no evidence
of memory loss or cognitive impairment. Since we are passed the critical first
few days where statistically she was more likely to have a stroke, and there
have been no more incidents, we are acting as if everything is okay. She has a
follow up appointment the end of the month, but unless something else happens I
assume this event is behind us now. On the other hand, we still don’t have a
definitive cause and probably never will. The two most likely causes are either
TIA (mini-stroke) or complex migraine, neither of which leave any physiological
evidence. Not knowing why this frightening event happened, there is no real
assurance that it won’t happen again. Every day we get further from the event,
the worry is reduced, but should it be? Since we don’t know why it happened isn’t
it just as likely that it could happen again and we’re just hoping it won’t?
Work carried on this
week, almost like I was there. A couple of things worked in my favor. There is
a large project I have been working on and trying to finish. I needed to do
that whether I was here or there and that involved computer work and thinking.
In fact it might have been easier not being on campus. I will say my travel
induced insomnia also helped. If I stayed up late, I could communicate with
people in their morning. When I woke up at 3:30, I would catch them in the
middle of the afternoon. In any case, other than Monday when I was really
struggling with computer connectivity issues, it was a productive week. I didn’t
feel too guilty. Having just about wrapped up my project, I am sure I will
still have daily communication and interaction with the folks in India but I
should be able to enjoy my “vacation” portion of the trip much more.
The third aspect of
this week has been involvement with family and specifically trying to help more
since Rae wasn’t supposed to do much. Now she might say, “What? That was
helping?” but I did try. We had Carrigan every morning while Sarah taught
pre-school. We also tried to take most of the care duty for Lincoln because
Becca has been ill so caring for Isabel, which she is uniquely equipped right
now to do, took all of her strength. You add to this a soccer practice and game
for Quincy and Colvin and a baseball game for Julien and you have good quality
grandkid time. We also saw and interacted a bit with Merrick, Maude, and Lauren
but our time with them was definitely less than the others. We’ll have to make
up for that this next week.
All in all a good
week of grand parenting. Definitely not something you can do very effectively
remotely.
Namaste.
No comments:
Post a Comment