Marian Ronan

Humbled

September 26, 2020 at 4:54 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Over the summer, I had gotten back to blogging. But then, after August 23, I stopped again.

I’m writing this post to explain what happened.

Towards the middle of August, there was a small event that may have been a warning: eating supper one night, my top left eye tooth broke and popped out. My dentist had been mulling over whether to do a root canal on it when his office shut down for the pandemic. I guess that problem is solved.

Then, on August 31, I had the first of two cataract surgeries, both of which I had been greatly anticipating, since the pandemic had forced my earlier appointments to be cancelled back in March. Not being able to read street signs, house numbers, etc., is pretty annoying.

The surgery went fine, but afterwards I began feeling sicker and sicker, with symptoms the details of which I’ll spare you. On September 6 we went to an urgent cares place and I was diagnosed with pneumonia. For the next ten days or so, I felt pretty bad, but the antibiotics seem to have done their job. Most of the symptoms are now gone, except for feeling really tired and a little stupid which apparently can follow pneumonia for quite a while..

The other after-effect is that my primary care physician more or less ordered me to postpone my second cataract surgery until November to avoid a reccurrence of the pneumonia. Apparently pneumonia sometimes follows anesthesia. If you have ever had cataract surgeries, though, you may recall that between the two surgeries, the vision in one eye is seriously different from the vision in the other. My husband is now walking everywhere with me for fear I’ll fall down and break a bone.

With more than 200,000 people dead from the corona virus, I really can’t complain about all this. No ventilator, even. But it was a pretty humbling experience I am almost never sick. One of my doctors is given to telling me I’m an “extremely healthy seventy-three year old.” So I’ve been pretty puzzled by the whole experience. Maybe I am actually going to get old someday, and need to be helped when I walk, or to feel so tired I can’t just sit down and write like a wild woman. What a thought!

As for now, though, I’ll be back to you soon.