Day 42: The Day of Firsts
Today shall be summed as the day of firsts.
Overnight I wanted to try using the bathroom by myself for the first time. It is far easier to try during the night since I could wear only boxers to bed instead of also wearing basketball shorts, as I have, which are hard for me to put pressure on to pull down.
When you break down the steps of actually going to the bathroom, there are quite a few:
- Sit up in bed
- Walk towards bathroom
- Use two hands to turn on bathroom light
- Put pressure on door handle to open
- Push open door and enter bathroom
- Push close door once inside of bathroom
- Lift toilet seat (still done by Laura)
- Open boxers and use bathroom
- Flush toilet (still done by Laura)
- Put toilet seat back down (still done by Laura)
- Put pressure on door handle to open
- Use two hands to turn off bathroom light
- Close bathroom door
- Walk back towards bed
- Sit down in bed and lay back down
Over 15 steps that had to be thought through just so that I could go to the bathroom on my own! Kinda crazy, huh?
After going through that a few times overnight, I was able to slip out of bed so that Laura could spend a couple extra hours resting which was great for her. Last weekend she didn’t get much of a weekend since she spent it with me at UCSF so it was nice to give her extra recovery time this morning.
As I was talking with my grandmother this morning I realized that the way I was holding my phone was the same basic movement as trying to scoop food. Fast forward a few hours, I was able to eat a chicken, sausage and rice casserole by myself instead of having Laura feed it to me, as she has been doing.
I didn't get out for a walk with my mother-in-law and Sasha at all today, either this morning or later in the day.
I worked on two separate articles for Built Unstoppable, both of which will likely appear next week if I am able to get more cycles on them in the coming days.
I spent a little time this morning digging through the MailChimp workflow, making a few updates to the email that sends every morning, adding the Google Analytics tag and other tweaks. These are all things that I normally would check off as I walked through setting up a campaign but in the early days of trying to build all of this out, simply were overlooked.
During the afternoon, Laura and her mom ran out for a couple of hours while I hung out with Sasha and Darren. I ended up falling asleep for about 45 minutes which left me feeling groggy for a bit but I know was good for my body.
When they came home, Laura grabbed the overgrown stack of mail that has been building up. It breaks down something like this: 80% medical bills, short-term disability info and other notices, 10% junk mail, 10% everything else. The medical bills have started to arrive so that was fun to sort through. But, just like everything else, they are being put inside of their own figurative box to be dealt with.
Approaching this weekend Laura and I decided that we wanted to return to some form of normalcy in our lives so we added a date night for tonight. As with most things of late, that sounds easier than it is.
Usually over the past several weeks we would shower one night, shave another and brush my teeth at some point either on one of those nights or another random night. Tonight since we were going out we took care of everything at once. That took a lot out of me but I really wanted to spend time with Laura out of the grind of all of this.
Once we finished up with all of that, we put a t-shirt on me for the first time in six weeks and headed out to dinner. Yes, for the last six weeks I have not worn a shirt once. Since they cut my shirt off either in the ambulance or at the ER, it’s just been easier.
It was really nice to be fully dressed and head out to dinner with Laura. One of our favorite bartenders was nearly brought to tears when she saw us walk in. She had no idea what happened, like most others. When she heard and that we thought we’d come see her for our first jaunt back out in six weeks, she was really touched.
After a wonderful dinner with Laura, we made a stop for head ointment, which seemed to have gone missing during the day, and returned home.
While Laura relaxes with her mom for a bit after the busy but excellent day of firsts, I’m taking a deep breath in bed.
This was a day that really pushed my shoulders hard. There were a number of other smaller firsts such as helping get myself settled this morning; picking up my laptop with both hands, etc.
I’m happy with how much progress we made in a single day but am sure that my shoulders will hurt tomorrow because of it. I’m ok with that though.