Feeling Blue

I'll tell you one thing this experience of being laid up is teaching me:  that I am a spoiled brat!  That has to be a good lenten lesson.  I've often said I love staying at home, being in my house.  I've told Demetrios, who gets cabin fever very easily, that if you give me a book, some sudoku puzzles, some knitting, and Internet access, I can be happy for days on end without setting foot outside.  I would do well in prison.  So here it is only two weeks and why am I in tears?

And it's not even as if I'd been exactly imprisoned, either.  We went to Mena's on Tuesday night. She is suffering much more than I, having been laid up since her hip replacement surgery a few days before Christmas.  She wasn't allowed out of her house for more then three months.  Now, yesterday, she has had a knee replacement and will be house-bound again for I know not how long.  Thursday we went to see Leonidas and Ianna.  Ianna is recovering from surgery to correct a slipped disk.  She was not only housebound, but confined to her bed, for weeks.  My dear neighbor Frances, in Richmond, is back in the hospital with multiple issues.  She has something called reversible posterior leukoencphalopathy, which according to Wikipedia is a swelling of the brain.  She has an infection I don't know where that the nurse said is "worse than MRCA" and is resistant to ALL antibiotics.  Her blood pressure fluctuates wildly.  She has a gallstone.  Her kidneys aren't functioning properly.  She is unresponsive.  Now Dickie, her husband, is also in the hospital, having had a stint put into one of his coronal arteries today.  Poor Christos, my brother-in-law, can hardly move, from fatigue.  (Physical strength, ti turns out, he does have, but he feels too tired to use it.).

Now I think of it, maybe it would be very strange if I weren't in tears!