Knit One, Purr Too

Moving on

It feels like it has been a lot longer than just one week since this whole crazy roller coaster with my dad began. First there was the bypass surgery and then it turns out he had a very mild stroke, but we have constantly been reminding ourselves that we are lucky; he is lucky, and it could have been so much worse. I've spent a lot of time the past week driving back and forth from home to work to the hospital. My little sister flew down from Seattle and has been either at my house or my parents' house, baking delicious things for the staff in whatever department he was in at the time (she's a pastry chef), making delicious dinners to stash in my mom's fridge and freezer so she doesn't have to worry about cooking for a little while, or hanging out in the hospital to lend my mom moral support. Through it all my dad has kept up his spirits and his sense of humor, because despite all the fear and the frustration and the pain, the thing we have all held on to the hardest is that he is going to be okay.

Friday night they transferred him to an acute rehab program because of the stroke (he's going to need a few weeks of physical therapy to 'retrain the brain', but every single nurse and doctor and therapist is extremely optimistic he's going to come back pretty darn close to normal) and it feels like the whole family was able to heave a collective sigh of relief. It's still going to be crazy for the next few weeks and months as we all adjust to new diets, physical therapy routines, and any temporary limitations my dad is going to have due to the surgery and the stroke, but the good thing about my family is that we are all very good at adjusting to new things (you have to get *something* useful about growing up in a military family and moving nearly 20 times during the first 16 years of your life).

Through it all I have been knitting, sneaking in a few rows here and there, carting the Print of the Wave stole to the ICU so my hands would have something to do during the long periods of waiting and watching and hoping. It's blocking as I write this (for the second time, because I really ought to know better than to try to block lace points when it is early in the morning and I have had no coffee) and I am not sure if I have ever been so glad to have something done. It was a good project for hospital waiting room knitting, but there's a lot of stressful memories tangled into those lacy stitches from the past week and it feels good to be able to move on to something new.