After such a long day I should be sleeping, but to make up for lying down for much of today, my body doesn’t want to do that anymore. It wants to cough.

So, here I am, sitting up and coughing for a little while. It’s not so bad; now I can tell you a story.
Soon after I arrived home from my hospital stay, I sat down at the dining room table to watch C&D play. David saw me seated and ran toward me. Then he began to hoist himself up on my lap. “Oh, no, no,” I said, shirking away. “Mommy has a boo-boo on my leg. The doctor fixed it.” Then I pulled my pants down so C&D could see the gauze bandage.

They were impressed. Then David looked up at my head. “Now Mommy has TWO boo-boos!” he said. At the same time he noticed a needle stick bandage on my left arm. “ANOTHER boo-boo!” he said, pointing at it. “Two boo-boos!” (”Two,” beyond indicating the number two, also indicates for David “more than one.”) Then Carmen found the bandage from second, successful stick. “This one has a BAND-AID,” she said, stroking it admiringly with her finger. I didn’t even know she knew what band-aids were.

The gauze bandage was most impressive-looking, bulky and covered with a shiny Tegaderm, so C&D asked that I show it to them again, and again, and again. I decided that C&D don’t need any encouragement asking me to pull down my pants, and I began to tell them something about how Mommy was going to keep her boo-boo covered.

David stared at the pants, maybe wishing he could see through them, but Carmen moved on.

She noticed the hospital bracelet still on my arm. “Bracelet!” she exclaimed, reaching toward it.

I stood up. I’d sit somewhere else, out of reach.