A nurse has been coming every day to give me a shot of an antibiotic. It is for an urinary tract infection – either a new one or an old one that came back or keeps coming back. I keep having uti’s lately, and I guess this is a bad one, bad enough that pills won’t do. I don’t know. When I texted my doctor last week saying that my urine looked bad, he didn’t answer. Someone from the lab came and took a sample, and then someone from a pharmacy called and asked when the shots could be delivered.
As much as feel like an invalid with a nurse coming to the house, like when I came home after my spinal surgery almost four years ago, at least I’m not in the hospital. Yay! I was in the hospital for five days in October with, yes, an uti and wasn’t allowed to have my attendants with me to help with communication – a horrendous, torturous experience. When I texted my doctor, I told him that I did not want to be in the hospital, all the more so with Christmas and New Year’s coming up and with the hospitals here in Southern California now full of COVID patients.
Yes. You bet I’m grateful I’m not in the hospital. And that I’ve only gone to the hospital twice since March – once just in the E.R – when COVID became an issue after going there once a month last year. Yay, indeed!
It seems to me that this is a good metaphor as this year ends. This year which – I’ll just say it – has been pretty awful, no doubt the worse year of our lives, at least collectively. After all, the last really bad pandemic was the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, just over 100 years ago – and at least we now have Zoom and streaming movies and shows, let alone television, thank God!
In such a year, I’m finding that I’m grateful for the smallest or most mundane things, like my doctor giving me antibiotics, even in shots, for an urinary tract infection so I don’t have to go to the hospital (and also find it ironic, if not funny, that I’m more afraid of getting an urinary tract infection than I am of getting COVID). I suspect we all are. Hell, thank God indeed for television and Zoom and streaming movies! We won’t be taking them for granted anytime soon – will we?
And thank God that 2020 is just about over. Good riddance!
