Tanja power

Tanja was eating a rather grim looking hamburg today at lunch, eating it with her own two hands, it must be said, and between bites she offered up some thoughts that indicated she is looking beyond life within the confines of the hospital.

“Don’t do anything special for when I come home,” she said. “I don’t care about that.”

“You don’t?”

“I used to,” she said. “I don’t any more. I just wanna get back.”

“Ok, well, we might want to make it nice for your return.”

“Don’t. Don’t do a thing.”

“But we might actually like to. It might give us pleasure to do something to celebrate you.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well that’s ok, if you want.”

She chewed her burger thoughtfully.

“When I’m back to a hundred ten percent, I’ve got some things I want to do.”

“A hundred ten?”

“That’s the new goal,” she said, disappearing the last of the burger down her earth devouring maw.

This attitude may be partially responsible for her supervising physician’s decision to release her from RIO on Friday, quite a bit earlier than expected.

As close readers of the blog know, transitions are psychologically tricky for team Tanja. We were worried when they extended her ICU stay, only to discover that they kept her longer because the BP therapy seemed to be working. So staying longer turned out to be a good sign.

Then we were worried about leaving the trauma ward because the people were so nice and she was progressing well, but it turns out she’d progressed so damn well that she was ready to go to RIO. So leaving early was a good sign.

Then we got the inside scoop that if you work hard and show progress at RIO, they will keep you longer and if you don’t, well, they shuffle you off. So staying longer is the good thing.

So she worked hard and showed progress and now she’s leaving early?

Is this good or bad?

Well, it’s good. Very good indeed.

Today Tanja spent most of her PT walking up and down 23rd. And over the 45 minutes her physical therapist coached her on how to handle outpatient PT.

“They’ll ask you your goals, ok?” she said. “And maybe you say, ‘well, I want to run again.’ Well, they’ll point you that way, but they won’t stick with you for ‘return to run.’ But I do ‘return to run.’”

“Return to run’?” Tanja said. “Is that a thing?”

“Oh yeah. That’s what I do.”

“Could I do that?”

“Oh yeah,” she said.

She handed Tanja a business card with her info on it. I have it now. One could quibble with the art direction–but why would one do that? It sends a strong message of strength and indicates a focus on things that matter more than the careful balance of shapes and colors.

And some might find the act of slipping a patient a business card to be, you know, mercenary. Or predatory. But it did not feel that way to Tanja. It felt like a vote of confidence. It felt like an invitation. It felt like progress. It felt like a promise!

That is a lot of things for a business card to feel like, but this little card did all that.

And now I fully expect Tanja to be a runner again.

Are we getting our hopes up?

Yes we are. Way up.

What’s the downside after all? Crushing disappointment if you don’t reach your goal? Maybe, but the alternative is to preemptively crush your goals right now so that you can never be disappointed because you never dared to hope.

One is familiar with that approach. One cannot recommend it.

Today I had a number of hours in a row to myself between lunch and dinner. I came home and considered a nap–the bed called my name rather insistently. But then I thought I’d try what Tanja used to do. When you feel tired, go out and do some yard work and pretty soon you’re not tired anymore. You’re exhausted.

So I grabbed the rake and started working on the front beds. And after a bit Wren came out and joined me. We moved from the front to the side yard and then along the back fence. Between us, we made a mountain of leaves in the back corner of the yard.

And here and there, as I coaxed the leaves from beneath the apple trees, or out from around the hellebores or whatever these various things are, god only knows, I would see signs that Tanja had been there before me, back in February and January, pruning here and trimming there. It was incredibly heartening. I don’t know why. It might’ve felt like a reminder of all the things she used to do that she can’t do now. It did not feel like that though. And, honestly, I have long been a sensitive instrument capable of divining the sadness hidden in any small token or sign. But I could find not sadness nor tragedy nor bitter irony in these bright little cuts hidden here and there around the place.

She’s been here. She’ll be here again. Not like she was, granted. But who wants to be like we were? We’ll settle for 110%.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flowers

Yesterday’s sun turned to a gentle rain and a grey morning. Tanja’s day began early with occupational therapy: today’s exercise was getting in and out of her clothes on her own. The t-shirts we’re having none of it however and by the time Wren and I arrived at 8:00, she was on the verge of tears—the far side of the verge, to be honest.

Tanja’s roommate, who is on a daunting journey of her own, finds comfort in letting the TV lull her to sleep and, once asleep, she is I’ll-equipped to turn the tv off.

Normally the sound is not a problem—the speaker is in the little call button handset that sits by one’s head so the volume is low. But the light, especially the change from scene to scene, is pretty enervating for Tanja. We got her an eye pillow, which she is able to maneuver quite deftly, but last night she found that, once the light woke her, the tinny reverberations from the handset were climbing into her brain and preventing her from pushing her craft of sleep off the rocky shore of care and worry.

So she began the day exhausted, lost a fight with a t shirt and was feeling quite low, making her support team realize how much the support really flows in the other direction.

By lunch, she had gathered her strength and was looking formidable. And just now, as she headed off to her last hour of PT in this very busy day, she was issuing directives about birthday wishes that needed to be sent and household details that likely needed attention.

She is, in short, back.

I am off to get the Pad See Ew she has set her sights on. And I have a parcel of my t-shirts in my bag. I believe she will find they put up less of a battle.

https://youtu.be/TZGCP0W6DCg

This morning, for reasons unexplained, Tanja’s breakfast was an hour delayed and her dedicated spoon lifter had to leave for other errands before it arrived.

Not a problem. She simply fed herself.

“And,” she added with some pride, “I held the silverware the regular way.”

That’s as compared the “adaptive” technique of gripping it in a fist.

After lunch she and I went for a walk around the ward. We set off at a blistering pace but had to pause part way through to rest… happily I caught my breath pretty quickly and we were off again.

Then, back in the room, she settled down for an afternoon nap.

Tanja and I have long differed on the value of napping. She feels like it’s time she’d rather spend doing something. I feel like I am doing something. I’m napping!

Now though she naps quite a bit. And, as with everything else, once she picked it up she mastered it really quickly—perfect fucking Tanja—so now she can slip into a restorative nap with astonishing alacrity.

Sometimes when she naps, her mouth is firmly shut and her face takes on the same expression she gets when she’s listening patiently to something dumb she is going to disagree with.

Other times, when the fatigue is greater and the nap is deeper, her mouth drops open and one can’t help but think of Conrad:

…I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind…

But Kurtz never fell asleep cradling a plush bunny, like the one Tanja is using to retrain her hands the better to pet her cats. And Tanja doesn’t want to devour the earth. Not at all! She just wants to come home—an event she has only just started to allow herself to anticipate.

Tomorrow the hard work begins again.

But tonight here’s a tune with the right spirit, if not the exact right words. Plus, Clifford Brown and Maynard Ferguson on the same track, so you know anything is possible.

https://youtu.be/6v4fTR1yHd0

Here, midway through an unusually cold March, we have suddenly had a glorious spring day. Tanja celebrated by taking a walk around the Nob Hill neighborhood with her PT. She reports that a young girl stopped and stared at her as she went by. Tanja attributes this to the c-collar she is wearing but it seems more likely the girl simply picked up on that thing that Tanja radiates, all the time really, but pretty powerfully these days.

“I woke up in the middle of the night last night,” she said. “And my hands were tingling a lot. Or maybe I notice it more because my arms are tingling less. It made it hard to get to sleep, so I made up a little mantra. Do you want to hear it? Do you think it’s silly to have a mantra?”

“I no longer think anything is silly. Or if it’s silly I don’t mind. Tell me.”

“I just spoke to my hands and I said ‘Humming with healing energy, flowing with healing calm.’ And do you know what happened?”

“What?”

“I fell asleep.”

Tanja held a fork today and made the motion of lifting it to her mouth.

“If you put a piece of food on there, it might be too much for me,” she said. “But tomorrow!”

In the evening, Wren and I brought her green curry from her favorite Thai place. On a whim, we’d ordered dumplings but when we opened the box it was less like potstickers and more like triangles of aggressively deep-fried won ton.

Tanja took a bite.

“Not for me,” she said. “Life is too short.”

We put that aside and mixed white rice and green curry in a Legacy coffee cup–it smelled delicious and Tanja ate forkful after forkful, closing her eyes with each bite and savoring the flavor.

Now, the last thing we want to do is offend anyone. But these days, with everything so terrifically heightened, it is easy to imagine sitting at a campsite in lower Gallilee and listening to this beloved person declaim about fried won tons or tingling hands or anything at all and just seizing on every crumb.

“Never shall we fry the won ton, for life is too short. Instead let us make a meal of the curry and the tofu!”

“If the fork is too heavy today, let us wait instead for the morrow.”

“May you hum with healing energy, my brother!”

“And may you, my sister, flow with healing calm.”

It has been fun to put songs at the end of these posts. And today seemed to cry out for “Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year,” because we are very much waiting for Tanja to get home before it can begin. But that song is far too sad for how the day really feels. It feels much more like this:

It is just after 7 pm. Tanja has had a tasty looking dinner of spaghetti w/ pesto and is settling in for the night after a big day of hard work.

Two weeks ago at this time she would’ve been sitting with her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law, her son and her husband on the second floor of her mother’s house watching a youtube video of a baroque quintet busting out some Bach. Her husband is anxiously awaiting the moment he can get her alone to discuss the expression of obsequious rapture that consumes the face of the oboist as he transmits this music through his instrument. That conversation will be put on hold.

She grew up in this house and she has gone down those stairs, what? Tens of thousands of times. The vast majority of times it went just fine. One time it didn’t.

At 7 pm on March 3rd, if you’d told me we’d be here, I would’ve recoiled in fear. At 7:30, if you could’ve somehow whispered in my ear that we would be here, I would have wept for joy.

She is doing so well!

She went through two rounds of PT and OT today. She worked on stairs. She walked outside. She held a tray and tried to keep a ball balanced on it. At lunch, she reached over and took an apple slice and ate it.

I know these are little things and, when you’ve got all four limbs working away, it may be horrifying to imagine not being able to lift an apple slice. But these are the incremental steps toward recovery that, early on, all the caregivers could only suggest might come to pass.

Now, her PT and OT people are talking to her in vastly more positive terms.

So, lots and lots of hope for more improvement. And a new, powerful gratitude for everything we have right now.

Tanja is exhausted at the end of the day. She misses her home.

But our last nurse at OHSU, the one who helped us pack up in such a hurry, told us she had hiked the Appalachian Trail. Which prompted me to say to Tanja, “You’re hiking the AT right now. It’s hard work. It tires you out. But every day you are that much closer to home. “

“I’ll buy that,” she said. “I’m a baby hiking the A.T.”

“I don’t know if they work together like that.”

“I think they do.”

“Ok. So do I.”

Tanja is simultaneously settling into the new rehab place and gearing up for the work.

As it turns out, Tanja’s new roommate is the mom of her grade-school friend and childhood neighbor in East Moreland…and suddenly there she was— long braids and big smile, and very, very Portland.

“Do you remember,” she said to Tanja, “you’d go to a party and there’d be someone from out of state and everyone would be like, ‘wow, ok, really? What’s that like?”

“Now, when people are, like, ‘where you from?’ and I say, I’m from here, they’re like, holy shit, seriously?”

“I work at the water department and I’ll tell you the truth, Portland water is dialed in. I was standing at the outflow pipe the other day—the whole city of Portland, all the shit and rainwater gets processed and comes out this one pipe and there’s fishes living right there. It’s amazing. These guys are like NASA, but normal. Old school portland, you know? We had a winter party, the whole back wall was crock pots! Crock pots all the way down. If it comes to politics, you wanna keep the conversation short, but these are hard working people, kind people. I love ‘em.”

She asked Tanja what she was in for and Tanja gave her the short version.

“That sucks. Gawd that sucks so much!” she said. “But listen, you look good. You got this.”

Then she looked around quickly, leaned in and began to speak in a whisper.

“Look it, these guys are the best, ok. Let me tell you something though: just do whatever they say… whatever… there are only two ways to get booted out of here—stop working hard or stop making progress. But you put the work in and you show results, that’s all there is to it.”

“Okay,” Tanja said.

“I’m gonna hug you. Can I hug you?”

“Hug away!”

The days at RIO are much more scheduled and demanding. If Tanja was a baby in the ICU and the trauma ward was more of a kindergarten situation, this feels like she’s off to college—maybe a military school, if you can imagine one grounded in kindness and healing.

I can visit, but I can’t walk her up and down the hall or accompany her to the bathroom. In fact, an alarm would sound were she to leave the bed. They have taken control.

That is all for the good.

And, tonight as I got ready to go, Tanja said, “I don’t know why. I’m sad.”

On Saturday, March 4th, at 5 am, having thrown up in the MRI, and on the verge of surgery, her limbs immobile, she told me, “I’m scared. I’m scared I’ll never move my arms again.”

A week later, I arrived in the morning to find her crying and a little panicked. Her call button, the special one she can activate with her foot, had come detached from its socket—but she couldn’t know that. She just knew she was pressing and pressing and no one was coming.

Other than those moments, her spirit has been so powerfully infectious and, I don’t know the word— but wonderful will point in the right direction.

So to see tears tonight was a surprise. After all, this rehab was what she wanted.

Except that of course what she wanted was to spend the first weeks of March getting the garden ready. What she wanted was to take Wren to the coast for spring break. What she wanted is what all of us want, every day, without thinking to ask for it or remembering to be thankful for it.

One of the many things I love about RIO is how, when a nurse or therapist or caseworker or guy who takes the food orders comes in, it is as if I don’t exist.

“What do you want for lunch tomorrow?” he asks.

“I’ll have a garden salad and—Jed, what was the pasta thing I liked?”

“She was interested in your pesto,” I say.

His eyes do not waver from Tanja.

“That’s right,” she says. “The spaghetti pesto.”

“Spaghetti pesto and garden salad. Great. Any beverage?”

To me the point is, this is her body and her journey. I don’t know why she got sad today. Even after we talked about it, I didn’t know.

But, with those disclaimers, I’ll offer a guess.

Maybe she was sad because it’s finally safe to be sad. She’s come so far, she’s put a lot of really difficult possibilities behind her, she has pushed off a lot of fear and all of a sudden she can take a minute and feel it all—or at least start to.

Ups and downs. Ups and downs. I imagine she is asleep now—she worked hard today—and I bet she is sending little messages of encouragement to her fingers and her shoulders and her arms.

So, fret not. Tomorrow is another day and she will tackle it like she always does.

Meanwhile, here’s a tune that never fails to make her smile:

https://youtu.be/HmnWXfO4byU

A long, eventful day, pretty much entirely positive.

Tanja’s roommate in rm 10 of OHSU Trauma 13C is a lovely 86 year old woman named Nan who took a tumble when she hurried back into her house to get, of all things, her Trauma Alert Pendant. Anyhoo, she got pretty banged up but she is progressing and was set to go to a rehab facility yesterday, but her BP dropped and it sent her down a bad path that required the attention of a team of five or six medical professionals. They worked from five pm to about eight and every now and then they would reach through the fog to assess Nan

On first contact Nan, when asked, reported that she was 68.

“Eighty six,” Tanja said, soto voce, willing Nan to recovery.

Next, Nan, when asked, reverted to her maiden name. A good sign? A bad sign? Who knows?

“Nan,” the nurse said. “Do you know what year it is?”

“Of course,” she said, weakly. But she would go no further.

And we sat, on the other side of the curtain, just hoping for this lovely lady to come back to 2023. The first sign of hope came around 7:45.

“Nan, do you know who the president is.”

“Biden,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

By morning, she was in great spirits, ready to make light of it with the day nurse.

“I woke up in the night,” Nan said. “And I looked outside and it was snowing.”

“Really,” the nurse said.

“And there were young people just frolicking about.”

We are on the 13th floor.

“Well,” the nurse said.

“Just frolicking in the snow.”

“It didn’t snow last night,” the nurse said.

Tanja, without the use of her hands, could not make the cut off motion but one could tell she dearly wanted to.

“If Nan ever wants to get out of here,” she said, quietly. “She needs to shut the fuck up about the snow and the frolicking and the young people.”

Shortly thereafter word came down that Tanja would be leaveng OHSU to head to RIO at 1:30. Her personal shopper was deployed so that she could make the trip in something other than the diaphanous wrap that currently preserved what remained of her modesty. A tank top and a pair of light cotton pants with a drawstring was the request. Here is the report:

First of all, one wants to cleave to the path of positivity that has served us so very well on this journey. So, how to put it? When did the reality of Target become so unequal to its promise? Well-lit bedlam. Miraculously, amidst the despair, a suitable tank top was found. Super!

On to Athleta where the woman running things was so nice, just radiating kindness. She showed me exactly what Tanja wanted, but not in her size. She suggested Lululemon, just down the block.

On the way there, I spied drawstring pants on a mannequin in Anthropologie. I ran in. Perfection. There were, on the table, three examples in XXL.

I approached the register where three employees were chatting. The young man in the center of the trio saw me and said, “Can I help you?” in a way that made me fairly certain he couldn’t.

“The stock on the table there,” I said. “That’s all you have, right? There’s not more in the back?”

“No,” he said. “That’s it. What size were you looking for?”

“Medium,” I said.

“If it’s not there, we don’t have it.”

I enjoyed a moment of silence while I internally communed with the man I use to be back on March 3. And then I thanked the cashier and went on to Lululemon where, feeling somewhat defeated and deflated, I spent $98 for six ounces of stretchy fabric with no drawstring that, I was promised, were simply the. perfect. pant.

On the street, I checked my phone. Tanja’s move to rehab had been pushed a day.

I went back up the hill to the hospital and told Tanja the news.

“Ok, just as well,” she said. “Let’s walk up to the nurse’s station and see about timing.”

When we came out of her room, a young woman was standing there with a wheelchair.

“You must be here for Nan,” I said.

“Could be,” she said. “They sent me up here, they called me off, then they called me back.”

We took about three steps and realized: She has come for Tanja.

It was a flury of packing–all these people, nurses, so skilled at preserving life, just jamming random shit into bags, packing flowers into basins, hustling us off to Rio with a sense of urgency we hadn’t felt since the ICU.

“When they are ready for you,” one nurse said to me, “It’s kind of a ‘go’ situation.”

A nurse came back from somewhere with the perfect drawstring sweats and a fuzzy hoody.

“People leave this stuff,” she said. “It’s yours now.”

They stripped her down and dressed her up with gentle efficiency, I signed something and we were bundled out the door, Tanja in a wheelchair, me carrying bags of flowers and sundry items.

Good Samaritan is different from OHSU. It’s not a teaching hospital. And there’s a lot more marketing materials on the walls. But once you get up to the rehab ward, the people are, again, super kind, super engaged and seem incredibly competent.

Tanja’s room is comfy. It faces the NW hills. Little bits of the protocol are different–she needs a nurse to walk her to the bathroom, for example. And she needs to order food two days in advance because her days are going to be far too busy for that kind of thing.

She feels energized and ready. And, sitting there in regular clothes, she just looks great. So great that when it was time to order the food, I just handed the menu to her, without thinking. And, after a short pause and a mighty effort, she took it from me, and began planning her menu with little oohs and ahhs over all the dishes that , her new roommate informed her through the curtain, in a scornful, European accent, “will not fail to disappoint.”

“Really?” Tanja said. “That bad.”

“Well, they try,” her roommate allowed. “And the mushroom soup is quite good.”

They booted me at 8:00. And in a minute I was accelerating onto 30, merging on 405, joining I5, watching my fellow travelers tailgate and brake-check each other at 75 miles an hour.

All day long I see kindness and connection. Sure Anthropologie was tough, but the exception proves the rule. Kindness everywhere you look. Then these same people get in their cars and it is war and chaos. It’s not an original thought to suggest that the anonymity the auto provides is the problem. Remove the connection, the trust evaporates and the kindness goes with it.

But these are problems for another day and a different blog. Right now, imagine Tanja, deep in sleep, sending dreamy pep talks to her resting limbs. Tomorrow she gets to work.

Tanja has not made any phone calls since the accident, largely because she can’t dial or hold the phone, but today she received a call from the admitting nurse at the Rehabilitation Institute of Oregon which call she accepted with enthusiasm.

Apart from some moments up front where she directed how the phone was to be held to her ear, it went as you expect a call to go. Greetings. Pleasantries. A buckling down to business which consisted of pauses followed by statements that were clearly responses to simple, expected questions.

Her full legal name, her age, her address. Her place of birth. Her occupation. These provided no surprises to those who might be listening. Likewise the history of her progress since the fall is familiar to us all.

Then, finally, some unexpected information—unexpected, that is, to anyone unfamiliar with Tanja.

“My goals?” She said, brightly. “My goals are to do absolutely everything I used to do….Uh huh… That’s right.. Would it be better if I broke it down into smaller sub goals? … Mmm hmm.. Okay, I want to feed myself… I want to pet my cats.. I want to hold their little faces in my hands. I want to garden. I want to drive a car… That’s a partial list.”

Long pause.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My goals for my caretakers? I don’t understand.”

You can imagine someone saying this as the prelude to a withering attack. Tanja listens for a moment.

“Oh! I see. My goal for my caretakers is to have no caretakers. You know? I mean, my goal is probably a lot like your goal for your caretakers…. Exactly!”

They chat a while longer. Much back and forth.

“Okay then… sounds good.. I’ll wait to hear…right..right.. okay… thank you… goodbye.. yes, bye bye… we’re done.. actually done… I’m saying that the call is over now and you can take the phone away from my head.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. How’d it go?”

“Very well,” she said. “Very well indeed.”

I never read The Red Badge of Courage—it came up in high school and I made the determination that I could simply proceed as if I had read it with no discernible degradation of my academic trajectory—and my take-away is that we can imagine ourselves to be heroes or we can fear that we are cowards, but we do not know, truly, how we will behave until we have faced reality and acted.

Tanja told me today, “when I wake up in the middle of the night and I am alone and I can’t move my arms and all I want to do is get out of bed and just do something, but I can’t do anything, I just give myself little pep talks. I say, ‘this is not the time for action. This is the time for rest. This is what I am doing. I am resting this arm. I am resting this shoulder. I am actively resting it.’”

“My arms tingle all the time. From my shoulder down, like if they fell asleep, but the hardest sleep ever. It vibrates. So I just think of it like a telephone call from my brain. The line is ringing. ‘Hello, wrist? Yeah, it’s me, Brain. You ready? Fingers, you ready? Hello elbow, you good to go?’ The line is open, the phone is ringing and eventually someone will pick up.”

I don’t know about you, but I can, with no effort, imagine awaking in a hospital bed with immobile limbs and thinking a number of less progress- oriented thoughts.

Okay, so she’s brave. She’s kind. She’s beautiful. Whatever. This why in our short 20 years together I have, more than once, heard her referred to as “perfect fucking Tanja.” And, hearing it, I understood it was not strictly a compliment, nor did I feel moved to defend her with any vigor.

But, that said, c’mon! Given a job like this—hard work, discomfort, little reward beyond what you find in the effort, no guarantee of reward, the happiness of others in the balance— is there someone else you’d choose?

Michael Jordan? No.

The guy who built the Sphinx?

Heracles?

Well, maybe Heracles. Though if you asked Tanja to clean the Augean stables, she’d use a wheelbarrow not a river and it would get done with a damn sight less drama.

So, to recap: tomorow or Thursday she leaves OHSU and steps into the future!

https://tidal.com/track/112053597

Tanja cast aside the wheeled support and walked the halls with no more support than the PT’s guiding hand on her elbow. Epic.

Then she sat down with the occupational therapist and ran through the same exercises she’d done a few days back. These involve resting her arms atop a cloth spread over a flat surface and then making a variety of motions—back and forth like a windshield wiper, forward and back, like a piston, clenching and extending the fingers. The cloth is there to reduce friction, making the motions easier as it slips back and forth.

There were five exercises, ten reps each, on both arms. It was clearly hard work but she did it, going well beyond the benchmarks set last week.

All good news.

But it is hard to watch those fingers dumbly rumple the cloth without suddenly seeing other times: Tanja smoothing linen over her legs before starting a hem, the needle diving and rising, diving and rising. Fabric of all sorts simply behaved for her, draping and folding as if it knew it were in good, understanding hands.

That spirit is not in these fingers. And that is kinda horrifying in the moment.

And yet. The team on rounds came by, and yet another doctor we’d never met before poked his head through the curtain with a tentative “hello?”

Tanja stopped what she was doing and said, “Good morning! Come in! Come in!”

And the doctor, who had seemed on the verge of saying something else, broke into a big smile and just said, “Wow!”

It was a funny thing for a doctor to say but I knew what he meant. That “wow” just kinda hung there. They talked about how she was doing, hit all the familiar notes and after a minute he said, “Anything else on your mind?“

“Well,” Tanja said. “I’m sure you hear this all the time, but you guys are wonderful.”

“We don’t actually—,” the doctor began quietly, before mastering himself to say, “Thank you!”

“I just think everyone is so competent and so even and I just feel well cared for.”

He blinked at her for a second.

“Okay,” he said, as if he simply had nothing else.

Then everyone laughed and they went on with their days.

I get it. He’d walked directly into the beam.

Once upon a time, when I was new to Portland and new to my job, I went wandering through the maze of interconnected buildings the firm inhabited to see if I could find the proofreaders who were making such excellent comments and improvements on my work so that I could thank them. I found them in a dark corner beyond print production. I don’t really remember what I said.

But I do remember retreating to the stairwell after to gather my wits. And I remember saying out loud, for my own benefit, that very same little affirmation our doctor had leaned on: “Okay.”

I guess all I’m saying is, sometimes for all the progress, the path is fairly daunting.

But the spirit is in there. In her, to be accurate. It is abundant and natural and fairly inescapable. And if it hasn’t quite reached her fingertips yet, well let’s be patient and hopeful. Because she is.

Also, just a note if you’re still reading: Tanja is not getting emails or texts or phone calls sent to her addresses or numbers. So if you’ve reached out there, she’s not ignoring you, she’s just not ready to deal with the technology. Feel free to contact me at jed@wearembs.com and I’ll position you in the beam:)

I was walking with Tanja earlier today, when—

“Wait? Whuut? Walking you say?”

Yes, Tanja got up on her wonderful legs and walked up and down the hall, her arms resting on a kind of rolling lectern, so that she looked like she might be going room to room to preach her gospel, like some kind of itinerant evangelist of hope and love and flowing, wind blown hair.

For the first walk, the PT walked at her right hand, her arm around Tanja’s waist. They marched down the shorter hall twenty feet, pivoted and returned. Tanja rested on the bed, then did it again.

Later in the day she and I set out but this time she turned down the long hall and we cruised past the nurses station.

“Hey guys,” she called out.

“Look at you walk,” a young man called back. “Hey guys, look who’s walking!”

I feel certain their whoops were at least partially powered by the relief they felt on noticing the impeccable safety technique of her escort. I could be wrong.

The third walk, Tanja doubled down and we made the trip up and back twice. At this point, I was getting a little tuckered out, but I hung in there and at the end of our second circuit, she added a jaunt down the short hall and then brought it back home for the night.

She was last seen watching the Oscars. But even without looking at the votes, I know the award for best performance in a dramatic role goes to the ravishing woman in the open backed gown, Tatiana Berenice Alger, my idol.