means unsettled life. I’m still a kind of overseer of my husband’s recovery. I don’t do any work, real work, but keep the schedule of visits filled in. I made a Monday to Friday schedule and we have it on our kitchen counter. The aides can fill in their times or we do.

I recall what my then elder-counselor said when I’d taken on the task of supervising my parents in their last years. They needed so many aides. She said, I know this is difficult for you, particularly as you have an older husband to care for sometime in the future. He was only 67 then, so I could suppress that thought immediately.

Now here I am, bandaging his arm, checking his appointments: physical therapist, nurse, occupational therapist–calling their office when they don’t show up. Everyone says that our firm of home health aides is the best. They are good when they are here.

Now, should I make out a schedule for B’s exercises?  He does leg exercises with the physical therapist and arm exercises with the occupational therapist. I could write it all out.

Will that mean he does them?

Aren’t you interested in finding another guy? And she replied, What! and take care of an old man? Or perhaps: another old man.  I don’t recall. but you understand. Some women don’t seem to mind nursing two husbands, sequential husbands usually, but it’s not for her and not for me. I’m having trouble nursing one husband.

I remember as a girl, after my sister, six years older, started nurse’s training, friends of my mother asking me in an annoying whiney voice: Aren’t you going to be a nurse like your sister? .Rudely, I shuddered and said No!

I haven’t changed, but my situation has. My husband is recovering from having all his strength sucked out of his muscles by Lipitor. In order to do this he needs physical therapists, occupational therapists and a nurse to change his bandage every other day. The other days of the week, Tuesday Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, I do it  I can do it; I can change my attitude. After all, I don’t need to change his bandages today The wound nurse put a dressing on  that will last till Friday. All I have to do today is go to the grocery store.

If it only weren’t so humid. And today is my daughter-in-law’s Mother’s funeral. Everything will be better on Friday when the weather clears.