23 days to cast-off.  Just did the stairs again, dressed for outdoors.  But a smidgen of iciness left after shovelling, and my wiser head prevailed.  Later.

The casts are “weight-bearing.”  That is, balance has been the entire issue since Day Two post-op, when still in hospital I got out of bed and walked a few steps to a chair in my room.  Back home that night, it was me and my walker, but only for a few days, maybe a week, after which I mostly flew right on my own, with hand out for wall or something else.

#1 Daughter got me a high chair with black leather cushion top, on which I could get on and off with a little bit of shove and balancing.  Found it in an artist supplies store.  For sitting on at one’s easel, I suppose.  That was Xmas Day, a week ago.  She adorned it with a red ribbon that is still there.

Was back here 12/14, and in a few days was getting out of bed on my own and heading for the kitchen, where I got my bkfst of coffee, toast, etc.  A major hurdle had nothing to do with balance and locomotion but rather of internal motion, as of bowels.  The visiting nurse suggested strong drink and a suppository.  The latter is a defecation grenade which you put in the right aperture — not in your mouth, stupid! — and wait ten or 15 minutes.

This was my seventh day of non-defecation, and when the results came on schedule, I became one happy camper indeed.  Thenceforward, no problem, I am happy to say, and that’s all you are going to hear about that, except here to congratulate #2 Son, who went to Dressel’s Ace on Chi Ave. for a pair of handles to go next to the toilet on the window frame and returned with a beautiful 3–foot or so bar, thanks to advice he got there.  Next thing I knew, I was lowering and raising myself by right hand firmly clenching said bar and pulling.

Oh.  One more thing.  With casts up to thigh, how to fit on t-seat?  Simple, we discovered.  Raise seat, do without, holding urine-catcher at the right place so as to aim to please — as in the old men’s room admonition, “We aim to please.  You aim too, please.”

Now, a thought for the ages.  I regret none of this, fall and all, I told #2 Daughter on the phone to Pa.  It would be the height of bad manners to do so, I figure.  G.K. Chesterton saw no sense in divorce, being so grateful to be married once.  He was full of gratitude for the gift of life, which is nothing we earned.  Ditto Sir Walter Scott, who invoked “Sat est vixisse” in his Journal.

“Square the odds, and good-night Sir Walter about sixty,” he wrote with regard to an illness of which his brother died at 50, his father at 70 and from which he suspected he also suffered. 

“I care not, if I leave my name unstained, and my family properly settled.  Sat est vixisse,” meaning, “It is enough to have lived.”

So let us live.