Scaring myself and an impromptu dinner

 

Curried chicken salad
before running it under broiler to melt cheese

Last night I had a scary experience that brought home to me the isolation of living alone in your eighties. I am not given to nightmares, and I don’t think that is what happened. But I woke up slightly before four in the morning and was suddenly convinced that I could not roll over in bed to get up. In retrospect, I think maybe I was so soundly asleep and woke so suddenly that I somehow hadn’t “collected” myself. But I remember thinking that I must not panic and then, inch by inch struggling to turn over. I sleep, out of deep habit, on my left side, with my back to the cottage.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about how you get out of bed, but today I can tell you that I swing my legs over to the right and that momentum carries my body until I find myself sitting on the edge of the bed. Some time ago I learned of a physician’s advice to sit a bit rather than springing right up, and that made sense to me, so I do that. The advice also included lying there a minute when you wake up to adjust—I don’t do that all the time, and that may be where I got in trouble last night. Anyway, after that scary moment, there I was sitting on the edge of the bed, just like any other night. I went to the bathroom, came back and got in bed, and spent the next hour getting in and out of bed just to prove to myself I could do it. Four o’clock in the morning is not a good time for rational thoughts!

But a lot of things beyond the moment scared me—or at least worried me. If I couldn’t turn over, I couldn’t get to my phone which is always on the seat of my walker. I couldn’t reach to bang my Apple watch against something hard and alert the alarm system. I was just there. Naturally I thought of all the horror stories I know: a friend who fell out of bed and lay there for twenty-four hours before her son realized that she wasn’t answering her phone—she was safely locked into her house, which meant fireman had to be called to break in. Ironically she fell right by her telephone stand and the telephone was just above her, but she never thought to pull it down and call for help. Another friend told me her mother had pretty much the same experience—my friend wished her mom had had some sort of alarm to call for help but instead lay on the floor or a ong time. A friend of my brother fell and couldn’t get up—his wife was out of town and he lay there for twenty-four hours until she came home. The medical consequences have been long-lasting.

I realize the time may come when I cannot get into bed by myself, let alone get out, and I want to be proactive about this. But I’m not sure how. In the meantime, my panic died down in the cold light of day, and I was still in bed, making up for lost sleep, when Jordan came to give Sophie her insulin shot. I’m comfortable about going to sleep tonight, but I’m also aware I want to find a future plan.

As if to counteract the above, which to me had a lot to do with aging, I proved myself still pretty capable tonight. Christian and I had agreed on some menus—he was to fix stir fry tonight (I had gotten some interesting vegetables—baby corns, baby bok choy, matchstick carrots, bean sprouts, etc. But Christian had to go deal with the tire shop that was installing two new tires on Jacob’s SUV—the Burtons have had a rash of flat tires all at once, so much so that Jordan commented tonight that it’s really bad when you greet the tow truck driver as an old friend. “Hey, hi! How are you?”

So Christian and I traded—I had ingredients for a curried chicken salad with a crispy potato chip/cheese topping. I would fix that tonight, and he’ll do the stir fry tomorrow night, which is great because that’s when Mary Dulle comes for happy hour. So I rushed around, poached the chicken, cut up an enormous amount of celery, and got the chicken salad made by six-thirty. Thing is it has to be cold, so I shoved it into the fridge and cooked some asparagus that really needed to be eaten. Close to seven-thirty, we pulled the salad out, topped it with the cheese and chip mixture and ran it under the broiler. You really need CorningWare to do this! Recipe maybe coming in Thursday’s Gourmet blog.

But all was worth it when Christian took seconds and said, “Great dinner for spur of the moment.”

So tonight, I’ll hope to sleep the night through and not scare myself. Hope you do too.