Nightmare!

 It seems like I have not written a word in the past month! My hand pain is not unbearable. It does make me miserable, but hitting keys on the keyboard is not that stressful.

While bemoaning my fate, having scheduled the surgical procedure to remove the ganglion cyst, my right knee decided to act up in a big way. I have not been able to navigate well. Especially steps. This means that while the weather has been excellent, I could not walk around outside. I could not make it down the steps to pick up my kitten. Going anywhere was doable, but the aftermath of pain was not worth the effort.

In the midst of all my woes, I was in bed, leg propped on a pillow and hand propped on a dog. I decided to shift my position and threw my back out. Very few people are that talented.

After two days of lying flat in bed, my back is better. My knee and hand are not. I have finished off several books. Two of them were playing when I dozed off. Nothing about the plots sucked me in and I just moved on to another book.

One good thing happened while I was without things to do. I discovered a long-lost cousin on Facebook. We share a birthday; she is three years younger than me. I hope to meet up with her next time we head south.

When I was growing up, the one constant in my life was the farm my grandparents had that we always went "home" to when my dad was on a ship for 9 months. That is the only time we saw our cousins. Not our only cousins, there were plenty, just none that we ever spent any time with. All of the cousins on my dad's side lived in Pennsylvania. He had 3 sisters, and they had 11 children between them. My mother had 3 brothers. Her oldest brother had 3 children from his first marriage and then 2 more late in his life. Her middle brother was institutionalized once he became an adult and was hard to handle. He suffered a lack of oxygen at birth and was "never right". I remember visiting him when I was a child. He frightened me. He had trouble expressing himself in words and would talk too loudly to try to make himself understood.

Her youngest brother was my Uncle Jim. As much as I didn't know members of my family, I loved my Uncle Jim. He was one of those charismatic people who never meet a stranger. Nothing much ever bothered him; I don't know that I ever saw him mad. His wife, Hazel was my most favorite aunt. She was my example of what I wanted to be when I grew up. They had 4 children. Brenda, Donna, Robin and Teresa. Brenda and Donna were the ones closest to my age and we always wanted to spend time together.

I stumbled upon Aunt Hazel's obituary. She died just last year. It made me feel nostalgic for that time in my life when things were simple. Melancholy has been my mood of late.

I dreamed I was in the midst of the cyst removal. I looked at my hand and heard my doctor say, "I can't get this out!" The cyst looked like a jellyfish atop my hand with tentacles going down into my tendons and nerves. Wait, that was a nightmare!