So What's Next?

Wow – It is soooooo easy to check out of life and just do nothing!  It quickly becomes a whole new set of habits that are not necessarily good.

On the last day of April, I boarded a plane to Nashville to visit with old friends and attend a wedding.  It was the first trip back to my old stomping grounds in two years and I was excited.

As I finished going through security I tucked my thin, black travel wallet into my jacket pocket instead of putting it back into my purse which was inside my briefcase for it’s ride through the scanner. (This whole thing is TSA’s fault !)

The flight was on time and I enjoyed conversation with the two other “mature” women on either side of me.  We landed a little early; I collected my bag and went outside to meet my friend Kathleen.  As I waited for her to arrive from the cell phone lot, I thought about my wallet and went to put it away properly.

You know what’s coming…..I put my hand in the jacket pocket and found it empty.  My instinct was absolutely positive that it had slipped out of the slash-type pocket on the plane and fallen between the two seats.  As K pulled up to the curb, I told her to take my suitcase and go around again while I ran back to the gate.

I twirled around quickly and as I stepped off the curb I felt a POP in my right knee and almost fell to the ground in pain.  One side of my brain screamed “OMG I’ve broken something”  while the other insisted that I had to “go get the wallet” so I hopped back into the terminal trying to ignore the injury.

Fortunately, the Southwest lost baggage office was right inside the door, so I ducked in there and asked the attendant to call up to Gate 4 to see if they had found my wallet.   They said no, but I insisted that it was just a small credit card case and that it was probably lodged between the seats.

She ordered me to sit down and took off running up the escalator and returned less than 10 minutes later with my wallet in hand.  With the kind of human warmth that only Southerners can emote, she grinned and said, “Honey, I had to crawl on my belly to get this out from under the seats!”    We exchanged one of those good old Nashville hugs and she helped me limp out to the car.

K and I ate lunch at a favorite neighborhood haunt and then I had to admit that I needed medical attention so we drove to the ER.  Four hours later I had a stabilizing splint on my right leg, a prescription for Percoset and a suspicion that I might not make it to the wedding which was 40 miles away the next afternoon.

As it turned out, that was the weekend of the horrendous rains and flooding in Nashville and none of us went anywhere (although the bride and groom did get married!)   I spent the next three days on the couch watching one disaster after another occur in Middle Tennessee .  The rainstorms and tornados wouldn’t let up for two entire days.

My heart broke along with everyone else’s as we watched Mother Nature remind us that she holds all the cards after all.    My hurt knee was a minor injury compared to thousands of people losing their homes and the billions of dollars of damage to almost all of the major Nashville icons.

Thanks to the wonderful inefficiency of our medical system, it took 10 more days to determine that I had torn the cartilage in my knee, and two full weeks after the incident I had arthroscopic surgery to repair it.

Meanwhile I was becoming quite content to sit or lay around the house.  I’ve never had an injury that forced me into almost a month of inactivity – it’s really easy to sink into a state of do-nothingness!   I couldn’t sit at my desk and when I tried to type on my laptop on top of the splint it wobbled and made my leg hurt.

The voice in my head said, “ hey, this is a great excuse to not work!”  I actually started two of these blog posts but never got around to finishing them.  I just checked out of my work life even though one of the advantages of my self-employed work is that I didn’t have to.

So now I’m trying to get back into my old routine but it’s really hard.  I quickly got used to reading fun fiction and listening to NPR talk shows all day not to mention having other people do the grocery shopping and put great food in front of me!

Although I think it’s good for us to take a break occasionally, it’s also a little scary to realize just how fast life can change and in my case, how easily I mastered the art of laziness.