Limitations on Choice

So, in preparation for the motor trip that wasn’t, I collected eleven audio books from the local library: mysteries, histories and biographies – and J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. Three days driving each way: well, we would have a variety from which to choose, even if we didn’t go through all of them.

Choice is a valuable exercise – enjoying what we would prefer exercises our minds, and refreshes us. And it is often as rare as it is delightful.  Therefore, on last Friday afternoon at the doctor’s office, we were startled how suddenly we lost the choice to travel by car – airplane, or any other conveyance. We were not simply delaying our departure, when we learned that the antibiotics we hoped would clear up Doug’s cough would be administered by trained medical personnel, as into the hospital he was quickly admitted.

Now I know a more precise connotation of blindsided.

But, the blessing of having lost our choice about how and where we would be spending our weekend, is we were given the gift of doctors, nurses, aides – in clean and comfortable surroundings, and care that has been good. Most of the world does not enjoy this limitation.  (See Sodo Hospital. )   

The window in Doug’s room has been similarly a sharp reminder not to whine about what we “lost” this weekend, for it looks out on the helicopter pad at Baylor hospital’s expanding campus. He and I can see the folks who may have been as surprised as we were to be in a hospital, and some with more complicated problems than ours.   

One good thing is that we have many good books to engage our imaginations during Doug’s recovery.

Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time.  ~Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn