Countless songs describe how quickly things can change, The song that says it most directly to me – “things change, rearrange in the blink of an eye” – is by the Moonalice Band.
(You can listen or download a copy of the song and other of the band’s music at www.moonaliceband.com)
We’ve had many blinks of an eye moments this year, and things certainly have changed and rearranged.
The first was back in the winter when my wife, Adelaide, fell down the stairs at our house – 16 of them. Miraculously, she survived without permanent injuries, but it has taken months of recovery, and that process continues. Things change.
Then two weeks after what is usually a routine surgical procedure, I began hemorrhaging, and made two trips to the emergency room in a single day. Rearrange.
The resulting anemia left me weak and frustrated. It took an agonizingly long period for the red blood cells to regenerate, and I spent the summer only as a spectator.
I slowly recovered, though, and had enough energy to attend the Biennial Roundup of the Usual Suspects that I wrote about in an earlier post, although there were a couple of times when I just ran out of gas.
A couple of weeks after our return I stopped by the doctor’s office to get a prescription renewed. She asked about our trip, and when I told her that I’d hit the wall a couple of times, her ears perked up. You know, those can be the symptoms of heart disease, she said, and we ought to get it checked out.
I respect her skill, so I had a calcium scan the next day. We hadn’t gotten home from that good before she was on the phone saying that I needed to come see her that morning.
&nb The scan results put me in an extremely high risk category, she said and made me an appointment with a cardiologist.
Here I was riding along with the top down, so to speak, and I got hit by a log truck.
In the blink of an eye.
More tests, including a heart cath. The result was not what I had hoped for, so, barring the unforeseen – boy aren’t there a lot of unforeseens in life – in the next day or so, a surgeon will bypass the clogged arteries and we will begin adapting to still more changes in our lives.
There have been countless blinks of the eye that have been immeasurably great. But not so many this year. So we will be happy to put a close to 2008 and look forward to some of those great ones next year.
“Things change, rearrange, in the blink of an eye.”
Bill Brown can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com
