Fair warning: It may happen again.
See, the plan was for us to undertake this project in the spring. The concept was simple enough: We have a very small kitchen, what you might call a galley kitchen, so there aren't a lot of alternative configurations to undertake. While we planned to repair the adjacent den (there was water damage from an ice dam a couple of years ago, and poor drywall taping that dated back to the original construction), we couldn't exactly open up a wall or anything (the wall dividing the kitchen and den spaces was the back wall of the house as we bought it). So, technically, we weren't planning to remodel anything; we were simply replacing everything all at once.
Simply! That's comedy gold right there.
But it was a plan. And I was implementing it. I got an estimate from an outfit that advertised heavily on the morning newsradio. What caught my ear were the many testimonials, all seemingly from geezers older than myself, each more thrilled than the last that the contractor had handled everything, including the making of helpful suggestions when the inevitable unforseen problems cropped up. They didn't even need to cross our threshhold in order to write up an estimate: All we had to do was upload pictures. I could, and did, do that.
The estimiate came back promptly. My eyes watered just looking at it. Holy cow! No wonder the contractor could take care of everything. He could afford to.
I also sought an estimate from the contractor who'd done a number of projects for Middle Son and his wife Eileen before they left us and moved to Michigan. Middle Son was mostly happy with the work these guys had done. He soured on them a bit when he was fixing his house for sale. They had to repair the floor in his closet. The repair was obvious; it didn't even look like any effort had been made to match the original flooring or blend in. Middle Son had a theory for why this last job was a problem: "During Covid," he told me, "they grew too fast. We weren't dealing with the same guys on this last project." Still, Middle Son supported my plan to ask this contractor for an estimate.
These folks -- Middle Son called them "the Polish guys" -- made their estimate the old fashioned way: They came in person. And took their own measurements. There were some things that the first estimate covered that this one did not: We'd have to pick out our own appliances, for one, and pay for them outside the contract, too. But even figuring in the likely costs of what this proposal did not include vis a vis the other proposal, the Polish guys would cost us half as much, or less, than the radio-advertised contractor. (Who still emails me once a month, just to see if I'd consider having him do something else.)
Anyway, it looked like we had a plan, a contractor, and a fair price. But, naturally, since I am involved, there was a problem.
This time, the problem was me.
I'd noticed a health issue in February, serious enough to drive me to seek treatment. And I'm not one to run to a doctor: I'd gone to an immediate care place the first time the problem happened -- we call them doc-in-the-boxes -- and they'd given me an antibiotic and a recommendation to see someone for a follow-up. Which, of course, I had no intention of doing... until the problem recurred. Since we're talking kitchens, not cancer, I'll spare you the gory details. You'll have to buy the book for those....
Anyway, with pending surgery, there was really no way to move forward with the kitchen, and I suppose it doesn't take us too far away from the narrative to mention that we had to have some difficult discussions about whether we'd move forward with the kitchen at all, depending on how the surgery came out.
In the end, although it was a different doctor who did the surgery than the one who made the diagnosis, and because the second doctor could do the surgery almost an entire month sooner than the first doctor, the cancer surgery went well. Really well. In the nick of time, lucky well. Technically, it was a Grade 3 cancer because the tumor had erupted from the wall of the organ wherein it had been contained, and had started to cozy up to the tissue just beyond, but the surgeon was able to remove the entire tumor and enough of that adjoining tissue to satisfy himself that the entire cancer had been removed. Subsequent blood tests that look for the genetic signature of the tumor (this is a very new technology) have backed up the surgeon's hunch so far, so I have not had to deal with chemo or radiation or any of that stuff. I have been well and truly blessed, Northeand I hope I am properly grateful to the surgeon -- and to God -- who led me to the second doctor and carried me through the experience.
But, naturally, since I am involved, there was another problem.
I came home on a Monday evening, relatively full of vim and vigor, and fell off a cliff. I made it through dinner, but by the next day I could barely more. By Wednesday, I started trying to instruct Long Suffering Spouse about which bills come due on which days and where things were that she might need. By Thursday, I couldn't move at all. I'd walked 8,000 steps on Monday to prove to the hospital staff that I could go home. On Thursday, my Fitbit said I had 43 steps. Total. I was composing myself for What Comes Next... not frantically preparing a defense... which you might expect a lawyer to do... but just making my peace with the Inevitable.
Long Suffering Spouse will tell you that I was a bear at this time, barking at her, and generally being a real bastard. But, then again, she was trying to make me eat a whole animal cracker or a Ritz cracker -- one Ritz cracker -- and other equally impossible demands.
Well, they seemed impossible to me at that moment.
The surgeon called Thursday night. That's when I found out about the Grade 3 diagnosis. He wanted to talk about the pathology results and the new blood test, but he also wanted to talk about the demands I'd made for nausea medicine and pain medicine -- nothing had helped, believe me -- and he told Long Suffering Spouse that she could bring me to the Northwestern Oncology Triage Clinic (don't go to the emergency room, he said, which was consistent with what everyone else to Long Suffering Spouse, too) -- and maybe they could figure out what was going on.
I could understand everything the surgeon said. The brain was working, at least a little, though nothing else was. I tried to be gracious in speaking with him -- Long Suffering Spouse noted that I was not as short or curt with the surgeon, not nearly as bad to him as I'd been to her, and this did not make her any happier -- but, in my mind, I was saying goodbye to the surgeon, and, in my awkward way, apologizing for illustrating the old adage 'the operation was a success, but the patient died.'
What had happened, though none of us knew it at the time, was that the vim and vigor that I'd come home with Monday had been replaced, in increasing quantities over the course of a few short days, with urine, that had leaked from an unsuspected hole in my repaired bladder and was filling up every hollow space in my abdomen.
On Friday, I gave up and let Long Suffering Spouse take me to the triage clinic. I looked at it this way: There was no real point in dying at home. Certainly Long Suffering Spouse did not want me to die at home. She didn't want me to die at all; she had not resigned herself to my demise, as I had, and, if I did not acquiesce in this 11th-hour rescue attempt, her last memories of me would be especially bitter: I had fought her to the end. She would always be angry with me: Why wouldn't I listen to her? And, really, what difference did it make to me if I died at home or in the hospital? The additional discomfort of being moved, and perhaps being poked and prodded in the meantime, was a small price to pay for easing the transition for her. Let her feel that she'd done all that could have been done.
So I cooperated. I let her get me dressed. I let her help me into the van. I didn't throw up. I was beyond miserable, but I did my best. I was wheeled into the triage lab, which may have been on the 17th floor of one of hospital buildings, and thereafter wheeled to an imaging center on the ground floor. I don't know how much time elapsed. Four hours, perhaps, or maybe five. It seemed like forever sitting in the wheelchair waiting for an x-ray. Many were planned. Apparently only one was taken. It was enough to reveal that I was filling up with urine.
Once the x-ray was taken, a room was quickly found for me and I was immediately admitted.
Now, of course, it is possible that I was being melodramatic. Perhaps I really was not in imminent peril. A nurse told us that it was really unlikely that anything could be arranged for me before the end of the holiay weekend.
You see, I was admitted on the Friday before Memorial Day. Here's a pro tip for you: Try not to have a health crisis on a holiday weekend. Help may be hard to find. I'd discovered this for myself a few years back, on a Labor Day weekend, when I had my first heart attack. But that's still another story... and, anyway, at the time, we thought it was Covid.
Northwestern had what amounted to a basic cable plan with sports channels. If the White Sox weren't playing, there wasn't a whole heck of a lot that I cared to watch. Because it was a holiday weekend, one of the basic cable channels was running a Harry Potter marathon, while another was running a Star Wars marathon. When a commercial came on one, I could flip to the other. Long Suffering Spouse and I called it our Harry Skywalker marathon.
Anyway, despite my own certainty that my appointed hour had arrived, I did not die. I went home on Memorial Day instead. While I could not figure out how to wear pants, in no small part because I had two different drainage backs strapped to my leg, Long Suffering Spouse and I were supposed to drive to Florida in less than two weeks' time -- for a family vacation with all the kids, their spouses, and our 15 grandchildren, all under one roof -- and we did go -- although that may not have been the wisest move we ever made -- but this, too, is a different story.
While trying to figure out how we could possibly get to Florida, we decided to renew negotiations with the kitchen contractor. I'd mentioned my pending hospitalization, and they'd wished me well and all that, but they had moved on with customers who were willing to actually proceed with the work, and not just talk endlessly about the possibility. Some people, Long Suffering Spouse said, will go to almost any lengths to avoid redoing their kitchen.
They might, I thought to myself, and only to myself, even go so far as to die in an effort to avoid such a committment.
But I'd botched that up, too. So I surrendered to a different sort of inevitable: We got back in line on the project, put down a good faith retainer, and waited for our project to reach the top of the contractor's schedule.
They're here now. Today marks the beginning of Week 2 of the project... and even I am forced to admit that it's starting to look pretty good. Stay tuned for more about our kitchen follies in the posts to come.
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