Thanksgivingness

Didn't intend to disappear.

In fact I had a nice post all written about how nice it was to sit down at Thanksgiving with this small circle of people I care for and just talk and laugh and eat together. And it was, very, very nice.

But then there was this call one morning, a 6-in-the-morning call which is just late enough to be probably a work thing: someone calling in sick or someone with a question. Only it wasn't. It was a doctor from the emergency room using words like 'ruptured' and 'peritonitis' and 'surgery' and he was talking about one of those people, one of that small, dear circle of people.

So there was a year or so one day of sitting in a waiting room making up Games to Play While Waiting for Surgery to be Over (three - tell you later). Then there were a few decades in ICU watching numbers - green for pulse, next to the quadruple spike of the heart beat; blue for oxygenation with a swoopy sine wave; white for blood pressure, once every hour which nicely divided the decades up into eras.

And time did this strange, elastic thing where it stretched madly out into years and years and years but at the same time snapped past in an instant. Wednesday blurred into the previous Monday which seemed to be trying hard to be Friday and Tuesday disappeared entirely.

But after the first night, the night where there was talk of living wills and things, and after the first days or so, the numbers began, slowly, to change and finally one afternoon instead of the whoosh of the circulation boots and the bleep of the monitor there was a lively and cheery 'hullo!' from the bed. It became possible, just, to breathe again.

All of this happened of course during this rushing time (made worse by FINALLY the launch of this enormous, huge, ridiculous project that has been pending forever and ever ), this busiest of busy times when expectations are higher and resources are lower than any other time of year. And with absolute clarity the whole season has resolved itself beautifully into one simple thing: this year people I love are safe, and most of them are home and nothing, absolutely nothing else matters.