A Reflection on Day 11: Normal
As I was preparing for my surgery, one of the things doctors said (both my own doctors and the material I read, both in print and on line) to be upbeat was, “You should be back to normal activities in [some period of time].” Oh, don’t lift too much, and don’t plan on driving too soon, but both of those were, as I heard it, relatively short term issues. “You should be back to normal activities by….” Each time Karen and I heard that, we couldn’t believe it. We would stop and say, “That’s too optimistic. My normal activities include moderate hiking on uneven trails, maybe stopping to harvest mushrooms; or fighting through brush to lay out a trail; or, depending on the season, heavy gardening or tree work. I don’t those things professionally or for more than a couple of hours a day; but it still seemed (it still seems) unlikely that I would be back to those activities in the times the doctors suggested. Oddly enough, for most of the written sources the standard for “normal behavior” was g