A book, a podcast, a baby

Writers, especially writers who produce content on a regular schedule, should always have something in the pipeline. I do not.

In my defense, my pipeline has spent the last three days in bed fighting what I thought might be round four of the dreaded virus that shall not be named but turns out to be just a cold, according to the test I took this morning. I don’t know whether to be glad it’s not that or mad that I have a cold that’s that bad.

I was supposed to be going to a family camp this week where my husband will be preaching twice, but instead I am at home “resting.” When I was thirty, there was no rest involved in getting over a cold. I just powered through, which, we now know, is not the best long-term strategy. Mamas, please rest when you are sick. The work will still be there tomorrow—or next week—and your 61-year-old self will thank you for taking care of your body.

Ben was the first to get this year’s August misery, which is par for the course. Extroverts naturally always get things first. It’s one more reason to be an introvert—if you stay home you don’t pick up every disease the world passes around. We think he probably got it at physical therapy, and then as all good husbands do, he shared it with his wife.

Whenever we get anything, which isn’t often, and he has it first, I figure he just has a cold. They all look the same to me—like a man-cold. But in this one he kept complaining about how bad the sore throat was and how long it lasted. The rest of it went pretty quickly though, and he got to the hacking-his-lungs-out phase in just four days, which is record time. Vitamin C shots for the win.

By then I started feeling the sore throat, so I spent that first day doing all the things I knew needed to be done before I got sick too. We are in the midst of converting a construction loan to a mortgage, so allllll the paperwork has to be notarized and scanned and emailed, plus the signature of everyone who worked on our house and I am not even kidding. It was a lot. While I was out chasing down subcontractors, I got more orange juice (for the vitamin C shots) and stopped by the library for a little brain candy. That was Friday.

Saturday morning my head was (not literally) exploding. (Please don’t ever say your head is literally exploding.) I told Ben it was the second-worst headache of my life, not far behind the one that assaulted me during round three of the pandemically famous virus. It was so bad and lasted so long (more than 48 hours) and was so resistant to pain meds (two extra-strength Tylenol plus 400 mg of ibuprofen barely took the edge off) that I just knew we had “it” again. I also knew Ben was supposed to preach this week and then travel for work the next week, so I added worrying to all my sickness, which obviously helped enormously.

So we took the test this morning and it was negative—yay! We live to see another day. See? My worrying was effectual.

Anyway, that was all the introduction. What I really wanted to tell you about are two things I discovered through our recent suffering plus one happy note.

The book

I don’t read a lot of fiction, probably because I can’t find a really good story that’s clean. I don’t like violence, I don’t want a book to terrorize me (I’ve had this happen), and I don’t want to read about people’s s*x lives and illicit affairs. Every once in a while I enjoy a John Grisham novel, and years ago I was on an Agatha Christie kick, but that’s about it.

Then my friend Karen (yes, two Karens in the same room. We are so much fun!) told me about an author named Richard Paul Evans and loaned me a couple of his books and I really enjoyed them. So when I was in sick-day-prep mode on Friday, I went to the library and picked up one of his books, The Last Promise. You guys, it was so good! It’s a clean, suck-you-in love story, and while you think you know how it will end, you can’t quite be sure . . . It would make a great beach read. Very good brain candy.

The podcast

I don’t know about you, but when I have a headache, I can hardly read. This headache was so bad I kept the blackout curtains closed and the lights off, and sometimes a pillow over my face because of the light coming in the bathroom. It was bad. It’s a wonder I got through that one book, but thank you, Tylenol + ibuprofen for a little reprieve. (Also, if you fill a sock with rice and tie it closed, you can pop it in the microwave for a minute just to make it warm, and then lay it across your eyes and forehead. Throw a few drops of peppermint essential oil on it too. So soothing. #sicktips)

But, despite the amount of sleeping I did, 48 hours in bed with no reading is a very long time and boredom sets in quickly. So I started listening to a podcast I’d seen recommended in this post by Cara Meredith. The podcast is called “The Retrievals,” and you can find it here or wherever you listen to podcasts. It’s the story of these women who went to a Yale fertility clinic for treatment and the “shocking events that unfolded there.” It’s hard to believe what happened, hard to imagine how I would handle it, and even harder to fathom the sentence that was finally handed down.

Listen when you can binge, since it’s hard to not know what happens next. Warning: infertility trigger.

The baby

I’ve been telling the world for a while now that we were expecting our thirteenth grandchild in July, and he made his appearance a couple of weeks ago. Abel is as perfect as they come:

We are thankful.