Time Off (to Be Identified as a Unicorn)

So much for being dedicated to whatever half-year resolution I made some weeks ago. I keep planning to write, and never make it happen. Every day, on the Book of Faces, I read a post from a retired police officer in Maine, Tim Cotton, author of four books I cherish. He manages to write about the mundane pretty much every single morning. Of course, he is usually only in the company of his faithful canine companion Ellie that early in the morning. Maybe I should try to re-orient my varying amounts of early morning alone time to trying to write rather than trying to solve a few New York Times games (I'm looking at you, 356-day streak in Strands).

Truth be told, the last month has been hard. For the first year after my medical mishap--the one that led to my current almost full year of physical therapy learning to walk again not to mention now having only one kidney--everyone complimented me on how well I was handling things, how I always seemed to manage to find humor, to laugh instead of cry. I would tell them that laughing beat crying though I had cried more in the previous months than ever before. This second year is proving much harder to handle. More than once I have commented to the husband about the surgeon's having ruined my life. My physical therapist assures me I can someday walk unaided but may always be wearing an AFO (ankle-foot orthosis) on my left leg if I want to walk securely. I haven't yet donated various skirts and dresses that I expect I may never wear again, but it's getting harder to justify keeping them. The same with a couple of pairs of shoes, one of which I have never worn but bought because they were on sale and the identical pair I had was wearing out. Because of something called heel-toe drop, they will likely never work with the AFO. I do at least have some moderately dressy shoes that work with it, though I pretty much live in ASICS running shoes.

All that aside, my strange medical journey continues. I visited Dermatology Friday to have what several medical professionals had told me was a Pilar cyst removed from the center front of my head. "It will be easy to remove," they all said, "any time you're ready." After cutting the protrusion open, they discovered that there what they all said was a cyst was actually something called a calvarial mass. It's a bony growth attached to my skull. The doctors noted that removal would require sawing and recommended a CT scan to check for anything untoward in the underlying skull. Older Son pointed out that the location of the bony growth in fact makes me a unicorn. As for laughing versus crying, I'm still laughing about this latest medical wrinkle. 

Yes, unicorns can laugh.