By the start of my fifth week of recovery from hip replacement surgery, I was beginning to think I already had quite enough to deal with.
The surgery itself was behind me, but recovery had been complicated by a femoral nerve palsy that left me with limited control of my left leg. I was still using a walker, still dealing with pain, still needing help getting in and out of bed, and still discovering just how much longer it takes to do almost everything when one leg isn’t cooperating.
Even getting dressed had become a project. I had been living in track pants because they were easier to put on and more comfortable around the house, but getting into even those required adaptive devices, my walker and considerably more time than it once did. I was also still following my hip precautions, and some of the manoeuvring involved in getting dressed could be uncomfortable if I wasn’t careful about how I moved.
I wasn’t sleeping well either. Pain and the need for help getting out of bed during the night meant that both Glen’s sleep and mine were regularly interrupted.
I really didn’t need anything else.
Naturally, something else arrived.
I began having intermittent bouts of diarrhea.
Nobody enjoys diarrhea. Under ordinary circumstances, though, when your body announces that you need to get to a bathroom quickly, you get up and go.
That works considerably better when you can actually get up and go.
Right now, there is no such thing as a quick trip to the bathroom for me. I spend much of my time in my power lift chair in a reclined position, so first I have to find the remote and wait while the chair slowly lowers me back into a position where I can safely get up. When you’re in a hurry, that mechanism suddenly seems to move at half speed.
Then I have to get hold of my walker and make my way to the bathroom. Mine has two wheels on the front and straight legs on the back, which makes it very stable — but not exactly designed for speed. Trying to hurry with it would be a very good way to end up on the floor, so even an urgent trip has to be a careful one.
There is a certain incompatibility between gastrointestinal urgency and a walker.
I’ll spare you the details.
Suffice it to say that an unpleasant problem most of us have experienced at one time or another takes on an entirely different dimension when your mobility is slow, awkward and dependent on equipment.
Eventually, the bouts began to settle down, and I hoped perhaps life was going to give me a little break.
It didn’t.
The week started on Monday with another unexpected complication.
We discovered that we needed to provide some documentation for something that, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t have been particularly difficult to deal with.
Fortunately, I knew I had what we needed.
Unfortunately, most of it was on my main computer.
I haven’t sat at that computer since my hip replacement. My current mobility and the setup of my desk simply don’t work well together. The information was there; the challenge was getting at it.
Before surgery, I had been trying to network my laptop with my main computer so I could access files from either machine, but I never quite got it working properly. If I had, this would have been a much easier task. Instead, the files I needed were still sitting on the computer at my desk — exactly where I was having difficulty getting comfortable enough to work.
I did manage to make my way to the desk and stand there long enough to get the computer running and locate some of the files. I gathered what I could, knowing the rest should be relatively easy to find once I can comfortably spend some time at the computer again.
It did make me appreciate one habit I’ve developed over the years.
I scan important documents and save them on my computer so I can find them again when I need them. Of course, keeping the only copy of something important on one computer isn’t much of a safeguard. Computers fail. Hard drives crash. Things happen.
Our important computer files are backed up to the cloud, and I also use an external hard drive for an additional backup. Important records are too easy to lose if they exist in only one place, so I like having more than one layer of protection.
In this case, I wasn’t worried that the information had disappeared.
I just couldn’t comfortably sit down at the computer to retrieve it.
There is something slightly ridiculous about carefully saving information so you’ll have it when you need it, only to discover you can’t comfortably get to the computer where you stored it.
It wasn’t a catastrophe. It was something we could deal with.
It was simply one more thing I didn’t need that week.
That was Monday.
Tuesday started before six in the morning.
Tuesday and Friday are doggy daycare days for Piper.
Piper is a high-energy Labrador, and daycare has always been a good way for her to burn off some of that energy. These days, it has become even more valuable. A rambunctious Labrador racing around the house is not exactly what I need while I am slowly and somewhat clumsily making my way from one room to another.
So, twice a week, Piper goes to a farm for doggy daycare. When the weather is extremely cold in the winter, we sometimes use an indoor daycare instead, but most of the time she goes to the farm. She spends the day outside, gets lots of exercise and even gets to splash around in the pond a couple of times a day.
Best of all, she rides to daycare with Glen on his way to work. It requires a small detour from his usual route, but on Tuesdays and Fridays, that is part of the routine.
We normally get up around six, but at about 5:45 that morning I woke Glen.
“I’m sorry, but I really have to go to the bathroom now.”
At this stage of my recovery, getting out of bed is still not something I can simply do on my own. Glen helped me manoeuvre my leg and get myself to the edge of the bed. Once I was safely upright with my walker, I toddled off toward the bathroom while Glen and Piper headed for the kitchen.
Normally, this part of the morning is very simple. Open the back door. Piper goes outside, does what she needs to do, comes back in and gets breakfast.
Except there is a reason that, before my surgery, I didn’t usually just open the door and let Piper charge into the backyard when it was still dark.
I have a dinner bell beside the back door.
Before letting Piper out in the early morning, I open the door, ring that dinner bell enthusiastically and then close the door again. The idea is to give any wildlife hanging around our yard a little warning that a large, enthusiastic yellow Labrador is about to arrive.
Piper does not appreciate this ritual.
She is in a hurry. She wants outside. She does not understand why her mother feels the need to announce her impending arrival to the neighbourhood wildlife.
But it takes less than a minute, and I have never been in a hurry to deal with a dog that has been sprayed by a skunk.
Sometimes, instead of ringing the bell, I put Piper on her retractable leash and take her onto the deck. She can go about ten feet into the yard, do what she needs to do and come back inside. Once daylight arrives, she can go out normally.
Unfortunately, my morning wildlife-management system has been temporarily transferred to someone else.
Glen opened the door and let her out.
And apparently, the skunk hadn’t gone to bed yet.
By then I was sitting in the chair we now keep at the end of the bed because I need something with arms, and beginning the long process of getting dressed.
Getting dressed these days is not a quick undertaking. It involves long-handled shoehorns, a sock aid and other adaptive devices. I use one of them to catch the back of my pants and manoeuvre clothing into position. Then I have to get myself upright with the walker and make whatever adjustments are necessary once I’m standing.
So there I was, poking away at the morning dressing procedure, when I smelled it.
Skunk.
Not there must be a skunk somewhere in the neighbourhood skunk.
Thick, oily, putrid, fresh, nearby skunk.
The windows were closed. The air conditioning was on. The house was shut up.
And the smell was still making its way into our bedroom at the back of the house.
I immediately thought, Oh no. Piper has been sprayed.
I couldn’t exactly rush outside to investigate, so I kept working on getting dressed.
And waiting.
And wondering.
And listening.
Eventually Glen came back inside with Piper. He had already used the garden hose to wash her face and as much of her as he could before bringing her into the house.
Considering it was not yet six o’clock in the morning and he had just crawled out of bed, Glen wasn’t exactly dressed for outdoor dog washing.
Probably a good thing it was still dark.
He didn’t think she had been sprayed too badly.
Based on the smell reaching me in a closed house from the other end of the yard, I had a somewhat different assessment.
Piper came inside and ended up in our ensuite shower, where Glen gave her another washing with dog shampoo.
By this point I realized reinforcements were required.
Fortunately, our son is on holidays this week and was home. I phoned downstairs.
“Can you come and help? Piper’s been sprayed by a skunk.”
Then came bath number three.
This time Piper got the proper skunk treatment: hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and Dove dish soap. We try to keep the ingredients on hand because, after having many dogs over the years, we’ve learned that a skunk incident seems to happen at least once a year.
Experience is a wonderful teacher.
After her third washing, Piper went into the large daytime crate in my craft room while Glen got himself ready for work.
And then came the next question.
Could she still go to daycare?
Glen thought perhaps she could. I wasn’t quite as sure, so I texted the daycare and explained what had happened.
The response came back: no problem at all.
It is an outdoor daycare, after all, and the dogs go into the pond a couple of times during the day. I actually thought that might be a bonus. Another couple of soakings certainly couldn’t hurt.
I texted back that it might be no problem for them, but it had certainly been a problem for us, accompanied by an appropriately green, nauseated-looking face.
There was also the matter of transportation.
Glen normally drives a newer work vehicle, and putting a recently de-skunked Labrador into it seemed like a decision he might regret for quite some time.
I suggested he take my car instead.
My car is older, already has Piper’s dog blanket in the back and, frankly, seemed the more expendable choice in the circumstances.
Off they went.
Only later did I consider one slight flaw in this otherwise excellent plan.
I’m not driving at the moment because of my leg, but when I need to go somewhere, we use my car. It is lower than Glen’s vehicle and much easier for me to get into and out of.
I have physiotherapy on Friday.
That could be an aromatic drive.
Meanwhile, there was still the house.
Even before Piper had come back inside, the smell had penetrated our closed home. I can only imagine what it must have been like for the neighbours. Our backyard is quite deep, and we believe the encounter happened near the back of it. The yards behind us aren’t as deep, which means Piper’s meeting with the skunk may actually have taken place closer to someone else’s windows than to ours.
Inside, we began our own air-reclamation project.
I went looking through the pantry for cinnamon sticks, found some and put them on the stove to simmer. Once the cinnamon became aromatic, it actually helped considerably. For a while we also opened the front and back screen doors to get some air circulating through the house, until the day became too warm for that to be practical.
Fortunately, my son was home.
He had already planned to clean the carpets for me sometime during his week off.
Apparently Tuesday was as good a day as any.
The vacuum came out. The carpets were cleaned. Surfaces were scrubbed. The leather couch in the living room received a thorough cleaning because we weren’t entirely certain whether Piper had managed to get onto it during the commotion, and nobody was interested in taking chances.
Then there was the laundry.
Anything worn by anyone involved in the Piper cleanup had acquired its own distinctive fragrance and needed to be washed.
We used air fresheners. We cleaned. We washed. We simmered cinnamon.
By the end of the day, the house was considerably better.
Not skunk-free.
Better.
That became apparent again at bedtime.
I went to put on my nightgown and stopped.
It smelled like skunk.
I hadn’t washed Piper. I hadn’t handled Piper. I hadn’t even been near Piper during the entire operation.
It didn’t matter.
The nightgown went straight into the laundry.
Glen said he could still smell skunk in our bedroom during the night, enough that it bothered him while he was trying to sleep.
And then, late that night, I remembered something else.
The big mattress in Piper’s daytime crate.
The crate she had occupied after three baths while still undoubtedly carrying some Eau de Skunk.
It’s in my craft room.
That mattress still needs to go outside, be thoroughly washed and hosed down, and then spend some time airing out before it comes back inside.
I’m fairly certain my craft room will appreciate it.
As for the rest of the house, I suspect we’re going to have little reminders of Tuesday morning for a while yet. Skunk odour has an astonishing ability to hide in fabric and reappear just when you think you’ve finally won.
And then there’s my car.
We’ll find out how that fared when it’s time to go to physiotherapy on Friday.
Eventually I’ll be getting out and about more again, and Glen and my son will undoubtedly encounter the neighbours on either side of us.
I’m pretty sure I already know how those conversations are going to begin.
“So… did Piper get sprayed by a skunk?”
Yes.
Yes, she did.
Wednesday came and went, and thankfully, there were no more surprises.
Thursday behaved itself too.
On Friday, we celebrated my granddaughter’s birthday.
Then came Saturday.
There were some Jube Jubes left from the celebration, and I helped myself to a few. I wasn’t expecting them to make a contribution to this story.
One of them pulled a crown right off one of my molars.
So now, in addition to everything else, I have a trip to the dentist to look forward to.
At this point, I think I’m going to stop commenting on whether things are looking up.
It seems safer.