Manny has “the gombu”–a phrase Naomi brought home from the Philippines. He caught it from his wife. I’m glad he is staying home with it, because the last thing in the world I need right now is someone else’s ailments. A knee transplant has to be 150% sterile, because germs getting into the transplant area never go away. There is just enough flesh to catch a germ, but not enough blood flow to fight it. Even the operating room has reverse air pressure, like a third-level diagnostic lab.
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I’ve been trying to get my office and bedroom halfway cleared up, but today we went to the physical therapist and got instructions and my new walker. The other one doesn’t work indoors.
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Any other medical devices I need will be issued at the hospital for me to take home, and we will be billed for the 10% we pay.
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Without insurance, the one knee I’m getting done now would cost about $33,000; presumably the other knee would cost about the same. This one is $175 copay per day for the first five days, then no copay; the next one, which is in January, will have a $200 per day copay for the first five days.
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I’m too sleepy to think. I can’t even read a Barbara Michaels book without going to sleep over it. So I’m going to go take a nap, and then come back and talk about a book called House Plants for the Purple Thumb.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .
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This book was published in 1975, and does not have an ISBN. I’d suggest looking for it at Amazon and eBay and Craig’s List and any other used book source you can think of. I’ve had it for twenty years, and I have checked every houseplant it lists that I have ever owned. Many of mine grew beautifully in Georgia but simply refuse to grow in Utah. I hate to think how many iron cross begonias I’ve killed off, but the one I’ve got now, which is in a much cooler room with a lot of other plants, is getting less water but seems–knock on wood–to be a little bit happier.
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But I’m going into the hospital Monday for surgery, and don’t know when I will get home. My husband refuses to water my plants. So I’m going to drench them all before I leave, and hope they’re still alive when I return. I’ll probably be there two or three days, and usually I water at least every other day.
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The book begins by describing the Purple Thumb Syndrome–the kind of person who can kill a aloe vera, when all you have to do with an aloe vera is nothing. I’ve got three perfectly happy aloe veras in my Egyptian display that haven’t been watered in six months. Last time I watered them they instantly, like overnight, grew two more inches, and if they get any taller they won’t fit the display and will have to be trimmed or else put into larger pots and watered often, so they will have baby aloe veras that I can put in the display.
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I had a purple thumb until I hired a babysitter named Virginia Williams. Mrs. Williams could drop a seed into a rusty tomato can and it would grow overnight into a beautiful plant. I tried to figure out how she did it. Well, she talked to them, for one thing. Beyond that, she seemed to have an instinctive understanding of what would grow in the climate and soil she had, and didn’t try to grow things that wouldn’t grow.
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That’s what the rest of the book teaches–how to know what you can and can’t grow in your own, present, situation. It doesn’t matter what I could grow in an area of heavy humidity, when I live in a desert. I have to grow what will grow in a desert, or I have to bunch together a lot of AeroGardens, which are hydroponic and produce their own climate if enough of them are together, and then add a few plants that will grow in the climate the AeroGardens create.
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If you have the room, you can grow tomatoes, lettuce, and many herbs in the average house, desert or high humidity. You can grow squash and green beans, if you have the room and the light. When we created “the barn” out of what used to be a screen room, we allowed a lot of room for plants, because I wanted a lot of room for plants. Now I can look out the window between my office and the barn and see my indoor garden, when my outdoor garden is covered with snow. My tomato plants have long since outgrown their planter, and I have to transplant them into something larger, but I don’t know whether I’ll have time to get to that before Monday or not. It is late Thursday now, and I have a couple of women coming tomorrow to help me get my bedroom, kitchen, and office ready for me to come home in a condition such that I can be on my feet about two minutes a day. Then after they leave I have to finish the laundry, which I probably won’t do until Saturday, and knowing me, I’ll probably sleep all day Sunday. I don’t dare go to church, because as sure as I did I’d catch a germ, and it would attack my knee just as it is trying to heal. So I’m stuck. I wanted to go browse today at DI–Utah’s version of Goodwill–and my husband was willing, though not eager, to take me, but when I thought about it instead of just yielding to impulse, I realized that it would not be a good place for me to go when I have to watch my immune system and protect it from invasion.
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And by the time I’m almost healed from the first surgery, it’ll be time for the second. I probably won’t get back to DI for five or six months. That doesn’t make me exceedingly happy, because I enjoy browsing, but that’s the way it is whether I like it or not.
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I cooked a party-size five-cheese lasagna today, and will be eating pieces of it from now until time to go off food and drink before surgery. I bought a lot of frozen dinners for me; T will probably live on burgers and pizza until I’m back into cooking. I had to be sure I didn’t get anything with broccoli or other cole (cabbage family) crops in it, because for a month I have to be on blood thinners. I do not understand the reason for this, considering that after my last surgery I had to have three units of blood because I bled like a stuck pig, but the doctors think that was a clash between two meds and it won’t happen again. I hope it doesn’t happen again. I don’t want to ask Bec to come over and water my plants again, as she did while I was in Texas for the family reunion, because she is expecting again, and although I know she’s quite strong and carries her two-year-old around, I don’t want her to be carrying gallons of water up and down the stairs. Maybe I’ll ask the lady across the street if one of her daughters can do it.
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I seem to be somewhat off the topic. Back to purple thumbs. If you pick your seeds carefully, to go with your soil and your climate, things are likely to go well. Learn to talk to your plants, maybe even to sing to them. Sometimes I go sit in the barn and crochet, letting the plants enjoy how peaceful I feel when I’m crocheting. You have to understand that plants do have emotions. I don’t understand this, but I have read in reputable publications that there are plant emotion detectors that work like lie detectors, and if you have good thoughts toward the plants the plants are happy, but if you think, say, that you might set one of the plants on fire, the needle goes crazy, because you’ve scared the plants. No, I promise I won’t set my plants on fire, so they won’t die of fear. I will go to the barn to do my physical therapy, and that will hurt but it will also make me feel peaceful because it’s moving toward being able to do my own gardening next year. And I will crochet in there, and if there is a bad stationary front overhead, so the valley is very smoggy, I will turn on my oxygen. Of course I have to turn off my plant lights and pumps if I do that, because AeroGarden warns not to use them where oxygen therapy is being given and I don’t want to risk an explosion, but the plants will feel warm and nourished because I am breathing comfortably, and after all, they LIKE to breathe extra carbon dioxide, even if I don’t.
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I’ll be back tomorrow with something else about plants. Until then, remember–for questions and comments, you can reach me at gardenwindow@aol.com. I don’t know it all, but I do know how to do research.
