Oscar’s chugging along in his recovery…spending his days moving from armchair to couch to bed to dining chair, and doing endless loops through the house during the transitions with a couple of bigger walks outside sprinkled in. We need to help him with everything while his spine is healing – all the hygiene stuff, and also the lying down, the getting up, putting on the brace and taking it back off. He summons us for middle-of-the-night trips to the bathroom with the bell we tuck under the paw of his weighted stuffed dog, Dougie. We lug his adjustable lap desk from spot to spot, lowering it to eat, raising it for sudoku, reading, and the iPad. He’s listening to zookeeper podcasts when he rests in bed, and searching YouTube for random things (like how to care for chrysanthemums, and who traded who in the baseball world). He’s even reading his old college government textbook to somehow make sense of this mess we’re in. Some days he’s energetic, some days he’s hit with sweating episodes — some sort of dysautonomia we think — that leave him headachy and lightheaded, and will hopefully resolve.

But mostly he’s getting stronger, and maybe a little more bored, every day. Over the weekend, as we were choosing where to walk, he started making a pitch to go on one of his usual 5-mile hikes in the regional park up the hill from our house. When we laughed, he responded “It seems pathetic to me that I can’t do any incline!” Yeah, no incline for a while yet (or bending, twisting, moving his head, reaching, lifting). He cheered up when I promised to take him to Point Isabel, a local shoreline park with tons of off-leash dogs. Now that he’s switched to hiking poles he can move faster and more fluidly, and by our second trip there, even after three miles of walking, we were passing other folks on the path and I forgot he was just shy of three weeks post-op. 

And somewhere in the fog of these last weeks, he turned twenty-four. Grandmary (who’d just been here helping with all the caregiving) sent balloons, and we celebrated with an extended family zoom and online board games and a documentary about a horse whisperer that his friend Nick had recommended. He wanted to go to the zoo, he wanted to hike, he wished his brother and sister were here…but he was a good sport about it all, as he usually is!