It’s Good To Be Back Home

First of all, thanks to so many of you who sent messages and emails wishing Terry well and hoping for a speedy recovery. 30 hours after her surgery we are home and she is doing fantastic. When she had her temporary implant done two weeks ago at Mayo, they gave her a prescription for 10 hydrocodone pills for pain. She only took two of them, so after her surgery on Monday she said she did not need another prescription. But when we got to the Hampton Inn that night, she discovered that she had brought something else and not the hydrocodone. Regardless, we both slept pretty well. Terry said a couple of times when she rolled over and landed on the area where the device and incision are she felt a sharp jab of pain, but she was able to get back to sleep.

I had an appointment at the hospital in DeLand yesterday afternoon, and we didn’t want to drive all the way home and then go there, so after breakfast at the hotel we took US Highway 17 south from Jacksonville, rather than the much busier Interstate 95. Along the way we stopped at Elsie Bell’s antique shop in Palatka, which I posted a blog about recently. It’s been well documented that the employees and customers quite often have an encounter with the shop’s resident ghost. I wrote about Elsie Bell’s in a blog post and you can read it at this link.

My son-in-law, Kenny, collects license plates. I don’t know if he uses them on getaway cars after bank heists or to decorate his man cave, but either way, I figure if he puts up with my daughter and grandkids, the guy deserves something. So whenever I stumble across any license plates at a decent price, I buy them for him. Yeah, I said at a decent price. I don’t love the guy, I just like him. I found a few to send to him after Christmas. I would send them sooner, but there is no way I am going to fight the crowds at the post office during the Christmas rush. Like I said, I don’t love the guy, I just like him.

Bad weather had been threatening, and just about the time we got to Deland it started to rain hard, but then it let up just as we got to the hospital. I got checked in and Dr. Rob Kent, my pain management doctor, did three injections in the cervical area of my spine. We also talked about how the injections a week ago in my lumbar area only helped for a day or two. It looks like after Christmas we will go with nerve ablation and see if that does any good.

Getting back to our part of the world, we stopped for dinner at Stavros Pizza in New Smyrna Beach. The sky opened up while we were there and the rain came down in buckets. It had eased up a bit by the time we finished eating, and on the way home we stopped at Walgreens to pick up some prescriptions. As we were pulling out of the parking lot, the rain started coming down hard again. When we got home we sat in the van for a few minutes, hoping it would ease up long enough to let us get into the house and open the garage door to pull the van inside (we have a remote control built into the van, but thieves have been known to drive around with assortments of remote controls, seeing what places they can get into, so we always close the garage door behind us and lock it from the inside).

But since it didn’t look like the rain was going to stop anytime soon, and because I had already gotten soaked dropping off something from Walgreens at my friend Jim Lewis’ house on the way home, I finally said to heck with it and went in the house and opened up the garage. By the time I got back in the van and got it inside I was a drowned rat. An over sized drowned rat. But wait, there’s more! I still had to go out to the mailbox and get two day’s worth of mail.

It looks like the rain will continue through the weekend and the weatherman says we may get as much is 6.5 inches here before the storm system is done with this. That’s a lot of water! Terry said the other day she’s looking forward to getting back in her kayak when she heals up. I sure hope she heals fast, because with all of this rain, we may need them sooner than she thinks!

Once we carried everything in from the van, I got into dry clothes and we got unpacked, we were both worn out. We spent a couple of hours watching television in our recliners before it was time to write the blog and then headed to bed.

Thought For The Day – I don’t have an inner child. I have an inner old person who wants everyone to shut up. – P.S. Miss Terry says this is proof that I am officially a grumpy old man. Was there ever any doubt?