my shoulder did not heal. i had to have surgery after all. i scheduled it for the week of thanksgiving so i would miss as few school days as possible. and still had over a month of physical therapy. i was extremely motivated but was slow to recover. and it hurt! everyone else seemed to be okay with the manipulations of the therapist. i had to use my lamaze breathing to get through it. i did my exercises at home religiously but i guess my body is just not very flexible.
i went back to teaching following the summer of my wreck, but i just couldn't get back to normal. i was not the teacher i had been before no matter how hard i tried. i continued until christmas with my constant sleep. i would teach all day, sometimes napping in my one planning period. i would nap as soon as i got home. i would get up for supper and go immediately back to bed.
a change of medicine helped with the sleeping but then i had more seizures, once "waking up" in someone else's classroom and not knowing how i got there. the eeg confirmed it and i started another medicine. at this point, i realized that i could no longer teach. it wasn't fair to my students and i had told my principal that i would not do that to her. so i retired.
kerry had retired in december and even though i felt so badly about leaving my students, i found that retirement suited me. in the fall, we realized a dream of going to cape breton for the celtic colours festival of music. it was such an amazing experience and we appreciated it to the fullest, sometimes going to two concerts a day and working in some beautiful hikes.... and also some amazing french food. our last night was spent dancing to one of the best musicians of cape breton. we had stayed at an airbnb on an organic farm and got to meet some really nice young people (who were quite impressed with how that old couple got around) they are the ones that took us to the dance.
the fall colors of the margaree valley where we stayed were the most beautiful i have ever seen, and i grew up in a place where the leaves are pretty incredible and we have hiked and driven in those mountains quite a bit. in fact, our first date was at graveyard fields on the blue ridge parkway.
it was just a magical trip in every way.
the summer after that, we moved to port st joe, florida where we bought and renovated a beautiful old house from the 1930's. it took major work, but such a great result. hardwood plank floooring, old pine walls, a carport with the traditional windows, narrow and up and down the window slats. (we made this a screened in porch. i realized a great improvement physically as we did the grunt work of the yard ourselves.
and then we bought one of those tiny trailers and headed west to see our children. it was another amazing trip. we saw so much of this beautiful country in slow motion, staying at some of the most beautiful places in the world. and our time with shosha and matt in california and nicholas and lydia were such a joy. because of my many health issues, i had not seen nicholas in almost two years. he and lydia surprised us by getting married while we were there. decided not to wait for a wedding but went to the courthouse just the four of us. we stayed at the beach while we were visiting as they did not have the space to accommodate us, and that was another beautiful place.
our time in the tiny trailer was very intimate, kerry and i and two boxers in a 7x10 space. we found that we really liked each other and is something i still think about and gives me joy in the memories. i just can't find sufficient superlatives for all the places we stayed.
my brain is not the same. i have reconciled myself to the change. any medicine they give me is meant to affect the brain, slowing it down to stop the seizures. i am very conscious of my inability to bring up common words... words like toaster and garage... not just more sophisticated words. sometimes i have no trouble at all with those. and my memory is considerably worse. sometimes i will stop mid-sentence and not be able to complete the thought... because it's gone. i have trouble spelling common words, and often do better to let my fingers do the muscle memory thing on the keyboard. and sometimes when i spell a word correctly, it just looks wrong. these are things i must now live with. but i have so very much to be grateful for. we live in paradise. i just need to pinch myself sometimes to know that i am really living at the beach. this place has numerous walking and bike trails. we walk to church whenever it is not raining. last night we walked to a restaurant bar with live music. i bike to the post office and cvs all the time.
so my life really has changed forever, but the good so hugely outweighs the bad. i am still so very, very grateful for the extra life i have been given.
No comments:
Post a Comment