Imogen (Photo and Essay)

At 0550 on Tuesday morning, my crushed index finger, from a swinging door (in the OR, which is stupid beyond all belief) and an oblivious surgeon who would not take one step to allow me in, failed me. That mug of tea in my hand, slipped in my grasp, indescribably, a lapse in memory and attention, and splashed all over the new macbook, named Imogen. The old computer donated to friends already gone, the new one a gift of generosity and practicality from D, astonishingly covered in tea.

I reacted, wiped, tipped, blasted canned air, raising a cloud of tannins. D, thankfully, was up, and being an old mac IT guy, was reassuring and took over from me, as I had to run off to work. He disassembled, researched, dried, and generally reassured me. I staggered off to work, and had an awful day of being snapped at by a hyper-tense surgeon that I generally don't work with, outside my specialty, in a room I've never worked in, with a new traveling tech who needed excessive support, after being set up by the charge folks way over there far from the ortho I love. With a sore, crushed index finger.

The most paranoid advice was to allow Imogen to dry for four days. D found less conservative suggestions, and hopeful signs - dry battery, dry motherboard. I worried. D set up his old iBook, Albion, for me. I waited, Imogen dried. I worried. Other worries gushed through the gap of a technical difficulty. Moby's heart murmur, Moira's need for fortitude, long tested, D's future plans. All the young women discussing their party dresses, asking me, "Going to the Xmas party?" (Answer, no, never even considered it.) My uneasy distancing from my mother - because my cousin here has an xmas card from her for me, has me chewing on that old bone of discontent.

So, although I could technically have posted, I did not. I paid my comments on your blogs, though my heart was not much in them. Sorry. The anxiety creeps up, as I hang in limbo. I snap at D, complain, cry, lie on the couch flipping channels, drink beer, drink tea, let my joints stiffen and ignore the pain until it forces attention.

This morning, D woke up Imogen, and I made waffles in an attempt at distraction. She has a rather pretty splash of light under the LCD layer of the monitor. Everything else works, apparently. D still wants her to have a check-up. He reminded me on Wednesday of the show A Piece of Cake. A pilot who misses his grip, falls and breaks his neck, dead. Little kid on a bike comes out of nowhere, and D is left with a mangled elbow, a year of PT and two surgeries to make it functional. I try to eat a steak tip at a party, wind up unconscious, with rescue efforts that leave me bruised and frightened, with disc herniations. Life changes in a moment. Life changes in every moment.