Bedtime

“Golly, Curmudge, I haven’t seen you for a long time.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s have come and gone.  I was afraid that Santa had run over you with his sleigh.”

“No such luck, Julie.  I just got tired of writing about serious stuff, like Curmudgeonocracy.  Let’s talk about something lighter which has, however, a serious ending.”

“Have at it, Old Guy.”

“Remember long ago when even in the comic strip, married people—like Blondie and Dagwood—slept in twin beds?”

“And now, married or not, it’s one bed.”

“Right.  But in real life, such as my 52 years married to the late Mrs. Curmudgeon, we slept every which way.  When we were first married and I was a graduate student, we moved the single beds in our apartment together and rotated the mattresses 90 degrees.  Then 31 years later we were back in single beds that were 2,000 miles apart (between Wisconsin and Washington).”

“Wow, Curmudge, that lasted for seven years with reunions in Appleton, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and even Paris.  And in Appleton you had single beds with a common headboard.”

“Then after I was transferred back to Appleton, Mrs. Curmudgeon contracted sleep apnea, and her CPAP machine kept me awake.  Dave was in the Army, so I moved to the single bed in his room.  I slept with the window open but had the bedroom door closed to avoid cooling off the rest of the house.”

“And you lived happily ever after, right?”

“With the exception of one of the most frightening events of my life.  Over the years Mrs. Curmudgeon had knee, hip, and shoulder surgery that robbed her of a lot of dexterity and the strength in her right arm.  Taking prednisone for interstitial lung disease produced her inevitable weight gain.”

“You are building up to something bad, Old Man, but I can’t envision what it might be.”

“One night in the fall of 2010 I went to bed (in Dave’s room) and inexplicably left the bedroom door open.  And I must have been sleeping with my good ear up.  Sometime during the night I heard a weak, repeated ‘Help! Help!’  A frantic search and there Mrs. Curmudgeon was, draped across a jumbo bale of Depends^®  head-first into a closet.  Because her arm couldn’t move the sliding closet door, she was unable to slide sideways off the bale; and her arms and legs weren’t strong enough to move her backward off the giant package.  If I hadn’t heard ‘Help!’ she would have been immobilized until morning with her weight against the pack opposing her efforts to breathe.”

“So, Curmudge, you fetched her out of the closet, and everyone went back to bed.  So what was the big deal?”

“The ‘big deal,’ Julie, was fetching her out of the closet.  I could grab her, but bent over, I couldn’t lift her.  Fortunately there was an exercise bicycle in the room, and I moved it close to Mrs. Curmudgeon.  Then I kneeled behind her, put my right arm around her waist, and used my left hand to climb up the bicycle frame until we were both standing.  It was exhausting.  We then both staggered off to our respective beds.”

“I presume that you never again slept with the bedroom door closed.”

“True, and we never speculated regarding what might have happened that night if my bedroom door hadn’t been left open.”

“I guess you both were just too busy.”

“The events of late autumn and the holiday season, as we described in The Last Christmas, proceeded as planned.  Regrettably, the menacing shadows (white on the x-rays) of pulmonary fibrosis and pneumonia also proceeded across Mrs. Curmudgeon’s lungs, and she died on January 18.”

“And that, Curmudge, is why at this time of the year we remember those special—and sometimes frightening—occasions of her life.”

Kaizen Curmudgeon

  

Link to posting from blog archives: Sepsis—8/26/11 http://kaizencurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2011/08/sepsis.html