12 July 2023
Tomorrow is the big day! I confess to being overwhelmed and humbled at all the attention my friends and family have lavished on me since this process began sometime in February. The old saying applies, you don’t get to chose your family but you do get to chose your friends. I apparently have a sixth sense in choosing friends – they’ve certainly come through for me.
Holley insisted on taking me tomorrow. She also insists she will spend the entire time at the hospital with me and take me back home. I protested but it doesn’t do any good with Holley. Once she makes up her mind there’s no changing it. She says she’ll take her adult coloring book and keep occupied while I’m in surgery.
Holley also made an excellent suggestion to pack an overnight bag and leave in her trunk in case the hospital admits me. That way no one will have to come back to the house and pack stuff up. Most of what I will need are charging cables for the lap top, iWatch, iPhone, and iPad. Apple rules my life.
John has volunteered to spend one or two nights with me in case I have trouble getting up out of bed. Neighbors have offered to cook for me, clean for me, and run errands for me. Not sure how I got so lucky, but I’ll take it.
People out of town and out of state call and wish me luck, cheer me up, and generally keep close tabs on me. It certainly has put me in the right frame of mind for the surgery.
Hopefully you’ll understand if there is no post from me tomorrow. I suspect I’ll still be a little hung over from the anesthesia and pain meds. I’ll start reposting as soon as I am able.
As far as the plant of the day, I submit to you Cape Leadwort (Plumbago auriculata), a native of South Africa. It was another of one of the first plants I learned with I moved down to Fort Lauderdale area. It’s a member of the Plumbaginaceae family but there are only two genera found in Florida. The other is Limonium.
Why this one stays with me is when I used to walk Rocky he would often brush up against the plant that grew along the sidewalks and the glandular flowers would stick to him. I would accuse him of being a hippie and wearing flowers in his hair. That evoked the old song “San Francisco” sung by Scott McKenzie where he sings “If you are going to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your hair.”
The glandular hairs of the flowers are very much akin to the glandular hairs found in the sundew family which use the hairs to trap insects. Sundews, like the Venus flytrap, are carnivorous. The glands of the Cape Leadwort are strong enough to trap flies but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this plant being insectivorous.
Wikipedia considers the years of the hippie movement to be from 1966 to 1972. From 1966 until 1970 I was busy with undergrad years at Ole Miss and trying to stay out of the draft. Ole Miss wasn’t terribly receptive to the hippie ideal although my dorm at Powers Hall had the first marijuana bust in Mississippi. Ole Miss was still making freshmen get freshmen haircuts and wear beanies.
From 1970 until 1974 I was in the Coast Guard and they weren’t terribly into the hippie movement either although Admiral Zumwalt relaxed the regulations for facial hair for the Navy which the CG tended to follow. Until then you had regulation hair cuts, no facial hair and no tattoos that showed.
I remember one crew member was so eager to grow his hair longer that he actually donned a wig that met the regulations. He spent the majority of time scratching the itchy wig.
The hippiest I got was buying a few paisley shirts I loved for liberty. The paisley design was very popular during the “Summer of Love” in 1967. I still like the paisley designs today. By the way, I wore those shirts to shreds.
It’s hard to believe but I still have bouts of diarrhea. I hope I don’t leave the operating team a present while on the operating table but if I do, it’s the fault of the chemotherapy. It might be a just payback.
Stay tuned!