I think it took me between two and four days to go from zero independent bed mobility to full independence.

I did it with no coaching from anyone except someone pointing out how to breathe to minimize pain.

After a day of total rest, today I sat up on the edge of the bed with minimal pain.

I accomplished all this by myself. Nobody told me how to do it. Nobody held me as I turned to the side of the bed. Nobody was even there.

I should have had physical therapy there using their expertise to teach me ways to do it. Celebrating each tiny improvement. Telling me that I could rest now and learn a little more tomorrow.

But my physical therapist was an ass who prizes hares over tortoises and therefore would have prevented me learning any of that by pushing me to collapse.

I think I’m going much faster as a tortoise.

Maybe sometime I will post every little step I took. Every single one was an accomplishment. And nobody was around to congratulate me, because to them quitting PT is giving up. They only started congratulating me after I accomplished the entire bedpan routine with no assistance moving myself. And they were surprised, when I had been working under their noses all along.

Really, really, nobody is so lazy they’d prefer a bedpan without some serious impairment that prevented them comfortably using other kinds of toilets. Patients aren’t all going to remain on bedpans the rest of our lives if we aren’t pushed. WTF.

Last year I was so sick and weak I shit the bed copiously. The nurses were frantic. They thought that if I did that I’d get used to it and never use a commode or toilet again. Get an effing grip, people.

“

“There is a larger issue,” Sillett went on. “The redwood forests of California were the most beautiful forests on earth, and they’re almost totally gone. They were reduced to scraps by us. Our society — and I don’t mean just American society; I mean Chinese, Brazilian, European society, all of us as humans — we are homogenizing the earth’s biosphere. We don’t know what will happen to the biosphere or the forests.  I’m afraid that our work trying to understand the redwood forest might just turn out to be documenting something magnificent before it winks out.  This forest gives us a glimpse of what the world was like a very long time ago, before humans came into existence.  We are in one of the last great rain forests remaining in the temperate zone. These tiny pockets are all that’s left of it. We can talk about conserving biodiversity, conserving species, but that isn’t enough.  We could keep the redwood species alive as a bunch of little redwood trees, but this forest and all that it shows us will be gone.”

“What does it show us?”

“Maybe these trees can teach us about ourselves. Marie and I and you, we’re nothing. We’re little snapshots in time, and we’ll soon be gone. This grove has burned in huge fires in the past millennia. Redwoods don’t die if they burn. A redwood can be burned to a blackened spar, and afterward it goes ‘Wooah,’ and just grows back.  Look at Kronos. It’s been hammered. It’s dying. And it’s more beautiful than ever. These trees can teach us how we can live. We can be hammered and burned, and we can come back more beautiful as we grow.”

”