Monica Ferris

More bad news. I fell this past Saturday. I was going to my writers’ group’s monthly meeting – which I’d been missing for a long time – and while climbing the steps to a front porch, tumbled over the side and fell perhaps three or four feet. The ground was hard and I think there was a half-buried rock. And there was the sharp edge of a blacktop driveway which my head struck, and split. Not a big cut as it turned out, but blood simply poured out. I was never unconscious but was very dizzy; I looked up and saw the treetops just whizzing past. The homeowner came rushing down and knelt beside me and said “Don’t move, I’m calling 911.” When he stood up, the knee and downward on his trousers was bloody, which made me stop arguing with him that I was okay. Other members of the group came out to commiserate and very quickly there was a siren. They took me by ambulance to Abbott Northwestern’s emergency room, where all this mess began back in March, so it was sadly familiar. I had an MRI – negative, no concussion – my hair was cleaned and the injury glued shut. I was told to go home, rest and try not to fall again. I am trying hard to follow instructions.

I had Ellen take a picture of my bloody, matted hair, but it’s so gross I will spare you all.

Yesterday in the mail I got a slender album of pictures and history of my father’s side of the family dating from the Civil War. It’s the work of Linda Ewebank, a cousin, and it’s beautiful, informative, awesome. Makes me kind of sad I have no children to leave it to.

I drove on Monday!  No problems at all. Parking lot, side streets, main streets, freeway – no problem. It was so great, I got my freedom back. No more annoying others for rides, no more not asking for rides because I don’t want to be annoying. Hurrah!

It had been suggested that I go to a licensed facility to be tested before driving, but when I called a recommended number – not the state licensing bureau, but a medical facility – I was told the testing took FOUR HOURS, three of which included cognition tests, sanity tests, coordination testing, a physical, etc. Then another hour (!) behind the wheel. Plus, it cost $400 – which was not covered by my insurance! I didn’t go. That kind of testing must be for someone who has had her license taken away, possibly after a stay in an asylum. Or prison. My license is secure in my wallet, was never even threatened by removal, and a long way from ordinary renewal.

So Ellen had a doctor’s appointment way up in the northern suburbs and I rode along so we could pull into a dying mall with lots of open spaces where nobody was parking. We had taken my car. I got behind the wheel and discovered my knee in no fashion interfered with my movement from gas pedal to brake. Ellen yelled “Stop!” at one point as a test and I slammed on the brakes instantly. See? No problem. So I drove us home. We stopped at a favorite clothing store and I found out my new dress size (I’m down three sizes!), and I bought a new blouse. It’s a store for plus sized women, and they have had a problem all summer getting their smallest size, which is what I’m wearing now, and sometimes those were too big. So not many choices – but I was so pleased to find I take their smallest size, I wasn’t annoyed.

My tower of flowers is having problems. The “vining geraniums” aren’t vining and the two smaller pots at the top have both had their petunias fade and die. I filled the pots with Miracle Gro soil left over from last year, and maybe that wasn’t a good idea. I replaced one small-pot plant with another petunia, but the top pot, which gets the heat of the sun badly, I bought a hen-and-chicks plant for.  Almost a cactus, it can take the heat.  It’s a really pretty specimen of a succulent – here’s a picture of it. Note the hen has only one chick.

The writing is still coming along slowly, but I can feel the juices stirring, and I think things will open up dramatically pretty soon. I sure hope so, it’s so frustrating to sit and stare at what little I’ve written and be unable to add to it.

Nearly two weeks go I was awakened around six a.m. by a crow sitting on a wire near an open window in my bedroom. Last year some crows had learned that if they sat in a tree across the street and yelled for awhile, I’d come out on our balcony and throw peanuts in the shell out into the street for them. This must have been a remnant of that mob. “Caw, caw, caw!” he yelled. “Caw, caw, caw!” Though annoyed, I obediently got out of bed and found what was left of the unshelled peanuts in a ZipLoc bag and went out in slippers and nightgown to feed him. The next morning he was back.

One morning it rained and he didn’t come, but this instantly became his custom: he’d call around six and I’d respond. (Then I’d go back to bed and sleep till seven or seven-thirty.)
Then last Thursday and Friday we went to St. Cloud for a quilt show, and it broke the chain; he didn’t come Saturday and Sunday. But Monday: “Caw, caw, caw!” I’m not really sure why I respond to his peremptory summons, why I am amused to obey – but I do and I am.
But: On Monday he brought a friend, and at nine o’clock a half dozen crows turned up, and called from the trees across the street. I understand crows can communicate with one another. Has my early-morning pal told his friends? And should I invest in a bigger bag of peanuts?
This morning he was late, it was nearly seven before he turned up, and this time he had two more crows with him – and four more came soon after. What’s going on? I don’t know. Two of them are still out there, one cawing in a peculiar soft voice that sounds curiously like human speech. But the daily feeding is over, fellows, till tomorrow.
The quilt show was fun. I didn’t get much of a chance to go around and look at the gorgeous, magnificent, beautiful, amazing quilts on display, because I’m still not able to walk any great distance, even with a walker, and this was a BIG show. But what I did see impressed me tremendously. If you ever hear of a quilt show in your area (say, less than three hours’ distance), go. You won’t be sorry.
We sold quite a lot of books. I sat with fellow mystery author Arlene Sachitano (she writes quilting mysteries – has nine titles – for a very small publisher) who was great company. And her books are very well written. Linne Lindquist and her husband Jack own The Craftsman’s Touch, a small company that sells quilting books and patterns out of Bemidji, MN, and at quilt shows all over the country. They’ll be in Houston in, I think, November and want me to come down. I’ve been before, that show is HUGE. And I’ll have a new book to push.
Ellen is putting together collections of my previously-published short stories to be published as slender (+60,000 words) e-books. Some feature Betsy Devonshire, some stand alone, some feature characters from my first series (Peter and Kori Brichter), some feature Father Hugh of Paddington, Mass Priest at Deer Abby, some are Minnesota small town mysteries Ellen and I wrote together. Some of them are pretty good. It’s been good to look back and see how many there are.

Here’s a photo Ellen took of me a few days ago with our cat Snaps.  I’m down twenty-six pounds from my last photo and I wanted a record of that; I suspect that at least some of it will come back as I finish healing.  The big thing is that the antibiotic I’m taking makes me a little sick and it has messed up my sense of smell so that almost everything tastes wrong, different, or even sickening.  Note Father Hugh of Paddington who stayed with me at the nursing home.  The white fluffy thing on my knees is a prayer shawl given to me by my church, a great comfort.

My muse continues her return, I am working on the subplot in which Betsy’s first husband pays a visit.  He is a retired Chief Boatswain’s Mate Aaron Ryan (called Rooster), loud and rude and very amusing, and he makes Betsy’s current beau Connor uncomfortable.  How could Betsy have been taken in by someone like him?  (Because she was very young and naive and he was sweet and protective of her.)   He calls her Betsy-Boo, she calls him Ron-a-Roo.  This is going to be fun.

Had a lovely holiday at the house of friends. We had a delicious dinner at noon, then went to a local golf course and messed around the putting green for nearly an hour. My healing has progressed to where I can stand and walk short distances without even a cane, longer distances on hard floors with a cane, but still use my walker for streets and sidewalks and carpeted surfaces. So I tottered around the green striking my three yellow golf balls and now and again hitting the little poles that they have instead of holes (which is good, as stooping to retrieve a ball from a hole probably would have left me unable to get back on my feet). Then back to the house to eat ice cream and watch a marathon of “How It’s Made,” and stitching.

I’m working on a belt in needlepoint. I bought it years ago in Savannah while on a book tour selling my first needlework mystery, Crewel World. (Just about every stitcher I know has a collection of projects, some started, all begging for attention. Now and again it’s a good thing to go into that stash and renew an acquaintance with it.) The belt features a row of galloping horses, all black. The horses are done, now I’m working on the background, which is layers of stripes. If you look closely, you’ll notice that each horse’s feet are in a different position – and that they describe the correct progression of a horse at the gallop. If I ever get it made into a belt I can spin around so it looks as if the horses are running around my waist. What’s more, I lost quite a bit of weight during my illness, so there won’t be a large gap between the strap and the buckle.

Have you ever seen a small bird attacking a bigger bird in the air? The bigger bird is probably a crow and the smaller bird is a bereaved parent exacting revenge for the loss of an infant from the nest. I really like crows but they are omnivores, and time the hatching of their young to the birth of rabbits, which is the main source of food for their hatchlings. But they steal other birds’ babies, too. And they will feast on road kill. I don’t mind that last, but it’s sad to watch a parent robin or thrush striking futilely at a crow in the air. You can almost hear the crow laughing.

I got the “tower of flowers” done this past weekend, but at a cost. I fell – twice. Hurt my tailbone the first time and scraped one hand and my left knee (it would be the good one) the second. So I’m using the walker more and my cane less until my confidence comes back and my balance improves. And yes, I’ve been walking with just a cane for short distances. Progress, progress!

On the other hand, the tower came out beautifully.  It consists of a metal stem about four feet long attacked to a three-edged flange you plant in a big pot.  Then you put pots up, tilting them side to side.  Here’s what it looks like. The lower flowers are vining geraniums, so they’ll drape over the pots and look wonderful, the upper two are petunias, and they’ll drape also. The greenery on the bottom is a perennial (but I’ll use it as an annual) flowering thyme that gets pink blossoms in a thick blanket all over it. I’ll take more pictures as summer progresses.  The round knobby things are glass bowls with stems I fill with water and stick in the dirt so there is a constant little trickle of water to the plants.  Garden catalogs carry them.

Today a friend is coming over to help me dig out my office. The paper is stacked a foot and more high all over the place and it’s finally gotten to where even I can’t stand it. I don’t know why I can’t do this on my own but when she is there to help we get it done quickly and efficiently.

And more slowly than I’d like, my muse is coming back to life. I’ve started on a new scene where Rafael consults with Betsy over his suspicions that the wedding planner is not playing fair. (If only he knew.)

Meanwhile the weather has turned nice and life is looking much better than when all this started.

Whups, Tuesday again, and here I am, not much to say.  I am back at work on Tying the knot, which is good news.  But it’s like pulling stalled cars, not eager to get moving.

Well, here we are, Tuesday morning and a blog entry waiting to be written. And not much to say.

I am getting better, I think now. Much less pain, anyway. I’m still shedding skin, a sign my kidneys are not all the way back on line, but I’m not being treated for renal failure anymore. I’m frequently cold, but that was not uncommon before all this. I’m sleeping well, and my dreams aren’t so weird. I went outside to sit in the warm sun yesterday, the first time I’ve done that since this started. Warm sun feels healing.

What’s more interesting is, I’ve started to take an interest in the people around me. When you’re really sick, all you want is relief. When you start to heal, you begin to take an interest in your fellow sufferers and our caretakers. And we’re a bunch of really interesting people. People with PTSD, people dying, people who swear loudly at one another, people who take a kindly interest in their neighbors. There’s a man-mountain with enough hair to give a grizzly a second winter coat, there’s a thin woman who must have a glass of chopped ice in one hand all the time. There’s a man who, he confesses sadly, could have been a really good novelist if only he could spell and understand basic English grammar. The staff, by and large underpaid and foreign, are amazingly kind and patient. One in particular, a tall, very thin African named Ishmael, brings me little treats every afternoon. I don’t know if it’s part of his training and required of him, but he does it with such a sweet smile, I can’t help but look forward to his appearance in my room. The physical therapy staff are pushy and insistent and that’s to the good – otherwise, I’d lie curled up in bed sleeping the day away. The knee is slowly, slowly stretching out and the rule is, push until it’s uncomfortable, not until it hurts. My favorite is named Vicki and she calls me “Sunshine” in a very sarcastic tone. So stretch, stretch . . . stretch. I’m starting to stitch again, and have opened the file in which lurks the opening scenes of Tying the Knot. Maybe someday, this will be behind me.

Meanwhile, here comes the “golden ball,” a base-ball-size plastic container of a powerful antibiotic on a thin cord to be fed into the “picc” that lives in a vein in my right upper arm. Sometimes it makes me sick, so I’ll go lie down for awhile to see how it fares today. Later I’m going out to buy flowers to plant on the balcony of my apartment in anticipation of my going home later this month. Which I hope to do.

Well, it’s been a long while since I wrote something for my blog, mea culpa entirely. Things have been spiraling out of control for awhile but I’m now trying to take the reins back into my hands. Hard to believe this has been going on since the end of March!! And I’m still bedridden, still sick, still suffering complications.

I thought things were straightening out last week when I kept an appointment with my infectious disease doctor who totally blindsided me by putting me back into the hospital because I was in renal failure. Funny, I didn’t feel sick. But I sure was, spent a very interesting hallucinatory night dreaming of fountains. I was released two days later, advised to drink lots and lots of fluids. So I brought a twelve-pack of bottled water with me back to the nursing home, along with a twelve-pack of Atkins chocolate shakes (eat protein!) and I’ve been drinking and drinking until I get the all-clear on my kidneys.

One mistake was thinking I was getting better more quickly than I really was and found myself on the floor of the bathroom late Friday night unable to rise – “help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” is a joke until it’s you on the cold tile floor, having neglected to follow instructions to press the red call button and wait for help. They give you a sedative and bring in a complex rattling canvas contraption that they can push and lift and press and tilt under you, and you find you have more arms and legs on you than you thought – it’s like you’ve grown a knee out your nose and where did that elbow come from? – until suddenly you are lifted gently into the air like a circus act. Amusing and embarrassing. But I promise now to wait now for assistance.

I have finished the notated ms of Knit Your Own Murder, and it should go in the mail today. Look for it in August.

Meanwhile, I’ll be at the Hopkins Public Library tomorrow, April 26, to give a talk on being a sick mystery author. Ellen thinks I should cancel, but I’m going to try to make it. I’ll be groggy but with a good enough hat I should be able to carry it off.