Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Social Life and Other Elusive Things


 

I’ve been battling a condition caused by a combination of my scoliosis (which never gave me a moment’s trouble before August of 2019) and the aftermath of my hip replacement surgery (coincidentally, in August of 2019). I won’t bore you with the many details, but this happened yesterday.


 

I started back with the Physical Therapist I was with in March of 2020, the one I had to quit for the pandemic. They start everything over after a 6 month hiatus, so I filled out the form again. There was a section asking what things are affected, and how much they’re affected, by my pain. The part that made me laugh was “social activities.” They wanted to know how my social activities are impacted, things like dancing and sports.



 

Hilarious! Dancing? Sports? They’re dealing with a woman who is happy she can walk. In discussion with another writer about my age, we both laughed about the social life thing. She thinks it made the pandemic easier on her to not have one in the first place. Nothing to miss. I might agree with her on that.





 

The only part I lament is my inability to handle my flowerbeds over the past couple of years. I can hire people to weed (after trying to find them for a long, long time), but they don’t weed like I would. They don’t do it right! I just discovered there’s a big pokeweed and several baby maple trees growing in my beautiful rhododendron right now. I broke off the pokeweed, but also need to cut off the trees. It would be best to dig them out, but I’m not up to that!

 




I count myself lucky that I haven’t had trouble concentrating on my writing during the plague. I know lots of writers have had that problem. Maybe I had good practice using my writing as escape in other situations in past years. Whatever, I’m so happy to be able to work on my projects and to even get some of them published.






 

Do you have leftover trauma from the pandemic? Or are you able to do things better now than you could during the shutdown? Or was your life mainly unaffected? We’re all different!

 

Rhododendron and bookshelf photos by me

Other images from pixabay.com

4 comments:

  1. Aside from the obvious, and not being able to see my children who are scattered all over, the biggest change was spending time with my husband. Ever since I met him he traveled for business, for years he was gone six months of every year. Until the pandemic we had never been together so much, and we were both a little worried about how we'd adjust after more than 40 years of going our own ways much of the time. The biggest surprise was how much we still like each other, maybe more than ever.

    My best friend had the same experience. She and her husband had never spent so many weeks in a row in the same house, and they are closer than they've ever been.

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    1. Aw, that's a sweet outcome. I've missed seeing my scattered kids SO much. I still have a batch in TX to see.

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  2. Would it be rude of me to say that you've made me feel better? I've been bemoaning my meds for blood pressure and osteoporosis, which make me feel tired all the time. Gee, don't I have it tough! I'll just add that I'm full of admiration for folks like you who keep on truckin'. As for the pandemic, I guess it didn't affect me much. I've always been a bit of a solitary (just ask my ex-husband, it drove him nuts), so spending hours at home either at my computer or watching my favorite old movies is no big deal. I do see less of my great-grandkids, since they, too, stick close to home now. Thank heaven for things like Facebook and Zoom and all these other things. I shudder to think what the psychological impact would have been on the entire planet. Lots and lots of letters? Phone calls? Anyway, hang in there, Tiger. You're doing great for the rest of us.

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    1. I'm glad to be able to make someone feel better! We did a few family Zooms and those were SO great.

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