Do I need to give you a minute-by-minute breakdown of my bathroom habits?
I know your bathroom habits.
And you don’t take that long in the bathroom, even when you do take a shit.
I’m sore as fuck and moving like a turtle.
Do you need to get checked out again?
I’m fine.
Just feel like a half-dozen wolves did a tapdance on my back.
Are you sure?
I’m sore, but fine.
Promise.
I even have pants on now.
You’d tell me if you weren’t fine, right?
I would tell you and I would even go to the doctor all by myself.
Should I wait on the laundry?
No. The meeting with the surgeon isn’t until three.
I’ll be done with laundry and over there long before that.
Great.
That means you can have on clean underwear when you get here.
Anything for you.
I’ll bring you some, too.
I didn’t like that he was still hurting, although I suppose I couldn’t really be one to criticize, given my own tendency to not go to doctors even when in more pain than I knew I was supposed to be in. At the moment, I obviously wasn’t being given much of a choice, since I was still in the James Blair Ward, awaiting a pre-surgical consult this afternoon—the reason I wanted Elliot to be here—to have my knee surgically rebuilt. They’d tell me what, exactly, they had to do to it.
I wondered if this would actually be an overall improvement, or if I was now doomed to an even more shit knee than before.
It would be nice if I could get some sort of benefit out of this whole shitshow of a trip.
Along with more medical debt, because I was willing to bet anything that Augusta Health was going to be out-of-network for the Shawano County government employees’ health insurance. Of course, if Walsh got her way, the law suit she was filing on behalf of Noah would end up including both Elliot and me, too. Humbolt had graciously offered to serve as co-council, and had also agreed to only require a fee if they were successful. And, in that case, the fee would be covered by the suit itself.
But I knew how slowly the legal system worked, so I wasn’t going to hold my breath. Instead, I was probably going to have to come up with some sort of payment plan, and that would eat into what little savings I’d managed to accumulate over the last year.
I also really hoped that I’d still have a job when I got back. You can’t just fuck off from work for a month and then expect them to take you back, no matter what assurances Lacy kept sending in her emails. Lacy might want me to come back, but I knew better than most that county—or state—policies might get in the way of that.
I had to remind myself to deal with one battle at a time. Right now, I needed to heal so I could have surgery, then heal again, andthenI could worry about going back to work.
And somewhere in there I was sure there’d be fallout from my father’s arrest. I’d have to give statements, recorded evidence, and then a trial, although that would likely be far enough in the future that I’d be able to go home for a while first.
Home.
Shawano was home now.
