Silver-Plated

I am told by Google that 23 years is the Silver Plate Anniversary, a faux finish for a year without a nice round sound like 20 or 25. I haven't come across anything silver-plated lately, unless it was an item in the nirvana that is the local college theater's props lockup (where we hunted for Music Man decor). For us, 23 years is the Show/Recovery/Surgery/Wound Care anniversary, with the attendant exhaustion that goes along with all that.

The Music Man had a fabulous run. We nearly sold out every show. Audiences were enthusiastic, and well they should have been. Our excellent cast put on a marvelous production and broke all box office records. The final run-up to the show went so smoothly that I didn't have any stress dreams at all during tech week, which, as any director can tell you, is an anomaly dearly to be wished.

Not so much the week afterward. Every night I shook awake, dreaming of props and missed cues and notes to give the cast, and wondering whether we were going into the Saturday night or Sunday matinee. Perhaps it was delayed stress, or perhaps it was other stress manifesting: on Tuesday after the show closed, one of our college daughters had surgery to drain an awkwardly-placed abscess which was draining through a fistula.

The medical saga here is one that many people will recognize. Our daughter has been feeling increasingly poorly since the beginning of the semester, yet we couldn't get anyone to look at her. The college clinic passed her on to a specialist, who couldn't schedule her until right before graduation. She was increasingly unable to sit or even lean on anything, was dropping weight, was fainting, and so I drove up and took her to the ER in the nearest big city. The doctor didn't even examine her. "It's not life-threatening," we were told. "Take over-the-counter remedies." The GYN looked at her, but passed her on to a GYN in our city, who didn't have an open appointment until July. The week after she came home, I took her to our primary care doctor, who suggested that she could be seen by the surgeons at the local hospital, if she wanted. 

And finally, she saw the surgeon, and the surgeon saw her. Actually looked at her on an exam table, and diagnosed her immediately. I was never so glad to hear that someone needed surgery. There was a real problem, not just in my daughter's head, and it could be repaired! 

The abscess, as it happens, was larger than the surgeon had expected, and the corresponding wound care is rather intensive. It is in a location which is almost impossible for the patient herself to tend. It must be dressed and repacked daily, surgical packing nudged with a q-tip into a gaping incision, accompanied by murmurs of, "I'm sorry, honey," and "Okay, we'll take a break for a second." This kind of procedure makes me wonder if I squandered my education on theater, when I knew from freshman year I was going to get married, and consequently could expect children. Why did I not go into nursing or pre-med? 

This is generally a daily process, but yesterday we unexpectedly had to change and repack twice, an unhappy process. It is perhaps providential that this surgery didn't happen while she was in college. How could she have recuperated from this away from home? How could she have rested like she needs to during the semester? Which of her group of friends (a nice set of young people, to be sure) would have been willing or able to pack a wound in an exceedingly awkward location? How would this work, even at home, if there was not someone whose job was the household and its concerns? It's not that I'm trained to this kind of work. It's that I'm available to do it, and in the right sphere of intimacy to assist this particular vulnerable human body.

This is my 23rd year in this role of our marriage partnership. It is a partnership, and we are a team. Marriage is many things, love and friendship and companionship and affection, but it's also an operation, and we are operating partners, keeping things running in our areas of competence so our family has a stable foundation on which to thrive. We work and build and repair, and we don't just patch over the weak places in our foundation so that it looks good from the outside. We do the painful and boring work of chipping them out and making them stronger, of packing wounds in intimate places from the inside so that they heal properly. No silver plating here.