Happy Old Year’s End

New Year’s Eve has a whole other flavour this year, doesn’t it? Less “Hurray! Let’s celebrate the start of another year!” and more “Is it dead yet? Are we sure? Should we set the corpse on fire to be on the safe side?”

I’m drafting this in November–already looking forward, yes, but also anticipating that December is going to be busy. But if there’s one thing that’s been clear for months now, that we can all come together around, it’s that 2020 has been shit. So I feel pretty confident that this post will still be current and appropriate on Dec 31.

I know, you know, and everyone who passed elementary school math knows, that the pandemic isn’t over yet, and we’re not going to flip a switch on Jan 1 and be at the end of this long hard strange year we’ve gone through. (Remember the Australian wildfires? Can you believe they were only just about a year ago?) How long it takes to end this chapter is going to depend on, basically, how successful anti-vaxxers have been in misinforming people over the last few decades about one of the biggest medical triumphs our species has ever had. I don’t know about you, but I will be getting vaccinated as soon as I get to the top of the list for one. Please, dear god, yes, let’s with all possible haste get back to a world where we don’t view strangers in public as dangerous infection vectors.

Still. Even knowing that the transition from Dec 31 to Jan 1 isn’t any kind of magic, I can’t wait for it to happen. I’m ready to burn the damned thing in effigy.

The surgery saga is too complicated to get into much detail right now; both surgeries were completed though, and we got home from the second one in the evening of Christmas Eve, but much too tired to have all the regular celebrations on time. So we did our Christmas Eve traditions on Christmas, opened presents on Boxing Day, and had our dinner on the 27th. We’re still acclimating to the recovery requirements. The surgeries were more complicated than a standard hip replacement, so there’s no weight bearing activity for at least three months–and given that this is is the first time this surgery’s been performed on someone with Echo’s skeletal condition, I’m taking that three-month requirement with a grain of salt so that we’re not too disappointed if it turns out to be longer. It’s going to take time to establish a new routine and feel comfortable with all the new processes for meeting their daily needs, but the hardest part is (/should be) behind us.

What I will say for now is how strange it is, to have had surgeries (or supported someone through surgeries) in Covid’s second wave. On the one hand, I’m so incredibly grateful that we were able to have the surgeries at all, given the restrictions and cancellations that so many have had to deal with. On the other hand, being in a hospital right now is hard. The rules on visitors, masks, eating, reduced space availability, lockdowns in the surrounding areas, all made everything so much harder, and these surgeries were already going to be extremely difficult. I’m still waiting to find a still point between those two poles from which to process the rest of it, and in the meantime, I’m mostly just numb.

I hope all of you are whatever passes for “OK” this year. I hope you and yours are safe and warm, fed and loved. I hope 2021 returns to you as many of the things you miss most as possible.