I spent the majority of my 66th birthday this past Sunday working at the parish festival. I joked with one of the parishioners that if you added another 6 behind my age, I would become the fabled “beast” of Revelations. Following the festival, all of the family and I gathered at a local restaurant and celebrated my birthday. Then, we went back to the house, had some cake, and then with Ruth, Meg, and my granddaughters, Alyssa and Sydney, watch the movie “Forrest Gump”.
What I did at the parish festival was set up a table in the merchant’s area to sell CDs and digital download cards of the music I have composed since 1970. All the money made would go to St Wenceslaus Church (I did make $120). At 66 years, following 4 major joint replacements, getting around and setting things up is a lot more difficult than it was 20 years ago. Finding myself grumbling and moaning about my present physical state, I suddenly remembered where I was on my 59th birthday in 2011.
On August 4th of 2011, I had been told following the 3rd surgery on my left hip that the MRSA infection had come back and I had to have the artificial hip I received on June 17th removed. I was to have had the artificial hip removed on August 10th, but the infectious disease physician at the hospital, not believing that I was allergic to vankamycin (the primary antibiotic for MRSA), gave me 600 miligrams which sent my blood pressure plummeting and put me into renal failure. I spent the rest of the 10th of August and all of the 11th of August in ICU. They were able to get my kidneys working again and my blood pressure returned to normal. Very early in the morning on my 59th birthday I had my left artificial hip removed. Not quite the birthday celebration or present I had anticipated earlier in the summer when I had gotten that hip replaced. I would not get another hip until January 18th, 2012.
The next 6 months I was without a hip. I spent the majority of the day, hopping from bed to the bathroom, hopping from the bathroom to my chair, and hopping from my chair back to either the bathroom, or at night to bed. I had to learn how to get my left leg into bed without a hip. My days revolved around the taking of antibiotics that the doctors hope would kill the MRSA without killing me. It was all guess work. October 16th had me back in the hospital for surgery when the MRSA infection came back a 3rd time. It seemed that just as the long incision from the back of my hip down to my knee would begin to heal, the infection would come back, and they would have to open up that long incision again to drain out the infection.
I remembered the many nights when I would dream about walking about New Prague. I would walk down to Patty’s Place, our local coffee shop, for a skim milk chocolate latte (no whip cream) and a low fat oatmeal raisin cookie (to offset the chocolate in the latte). I would walk to the library and to the city park. I would walk over to St Wenceslaus Church. In my dream, I still did not have a hip, yet, I was capable of not only walking, but running, and jumping. During the day I was restricted to hopping the few steps to chair, bathroom, and bed. However, at night, I was free to roam wherever I wanted to go all over the town.
I recall that I was thinking about this on Sunday, had you told the 59 year old me in 2011 that I would once more be able to walk, move tables, lift wares, and set up like I was doing on this 66th birthday, I would have been skeptical, cynical, and envious. This was a very low time in my life in which I had very little hope of ever walking again. However, it would have given me hope during a time in which I had very little hope.
So what is the moral in this little tale of mine? As dark as these times may be for us, the lives of so many people in crises and chaos; greed, corruption, incompetence and lies permeating our government, the white house, our nation, and the world in general, it will not be dark ages for ever.
Another part of the moral is that it is vitally important for us to live in the present. It is important for us to be aware of what we can do in the present. And, most importantly, we need to be thankful to God for that which we can do.
