Autumn

I'm in the waiting room of an outpatient surgery center in Palo Alto, where Cris is having some work done on her ankle. I think we've been here ten times in the last several years, as she deals with various orthopedic problems. Once she got something done at Stanford but usually we come to this place on the other side of downtown Palo Alto. After an hour or so we'll head home and she'll install herself on the living room couch along with a little ice chest with a pump; it circulates cold water to a bladder that the surgeon places near the arthroscopy incision when the surgery is over. This is to reduce swelling and promote healing -- a nice innovation. We have gone through this drill so many times that we piled a few of these ice water pump units in the basement at home, and today instead of receiving a new one we tried to give one back to the handsome young man who distributes them. He was very taken aback; apparently no one had ever refused to take a new ice water unit and tried to give him one instead. Eventually we arranged to simply give it to the facility.

I was here myself a couple years ago for a little cortisone injection.