Burrito Anyone?

Last night, I continued writing on Walking Between the Miracles. I am in chapter two and finally up to the moments before my first neuro-surgery. I have already told about how the N.I.C.U. nurses got pizza instead of tacos the night before  my surgery and so I did not get the taco I wanted. But I put my computer away before I continued writing my story.

This morning, I was thinking about the continuation of writing my book as I made something hot to drink. This brought to mind my frustration with having a tube down my throat when I awoke from my anaesthesia and trying to communicate with my mother, and that is when my daughter walked downstairs. Lucky her!

"Hey, I want to talk to you," I called out of the kitchen.

The poor kid probably thought she was in trouble. I sat down with my hot drink in the living room to command, "Show me your alphabet."

She looked at me with a confused expression and asked, "My phoenetic alphabet?"

"No, show me your alphabet."

My daughter shrugged and reached down to get her pen and pad of paper.

I stopped her. "No. Show me your alphabet." I moved my hands.

"Oh!" She sat up, closed her hand with thumb over fingers in the American Sign Language sign, and said, "A...."

When she finished her alphabet (with help), I told her two stories from when I was in the hospital with a tube down my throat and no way to communicate with my mother or the nurses. Let me tell you, I have found little so frustrating as the inability to communicate with everyone around me when I am completely incapacitated. That is the reason I taught both of my children to finger spell while they learned to read.

The only thing even close to as frustrating as the inability to communicate because a tube is shoved down your throat is the inability to r-e-a-c-h the burrito dangling beside your hospital bed and bein unable to ask for the burrito. Keep in mind that I was not lucid enough, coming out of surgery, to realize that even if I could reach the burrito (which turned out to really be an I.V. drip bag), I could not have eaten it with a tube shoved down my throat.