On surgery, bodily functions, and how my oldest daughter finally married a returned missionary (vol. xxix, no. 1)

Dear Family,

On or about Wednesday, January 8th, Hannah married Emma Porter during a small ceremony in their apartment in Orem, Utah.

I never expected I would devote the first sentence of two consecutive monthly letters to announcing the marriages of two of my daughters, but here we are.

Until relatively recently, I never expected that I might one day have a daughter-in-law, but here we are.

Life comes at you fast. Some events come as complete surprises. Others are foreseen but consigned to horizons that are not nearly as distant as they appear to be.

Hannah’s wedding falls into the second category. Only the timing came as a surprise — and not a huge one at that.

I’m trying to remember how old I was when I learned that people cry for reasons other than sadness. I have a memory of sitting in church as a young boy (which would have been rare, since I spent most sacrament meetings at that age being disruptive and getting hauled out into the foyer by one of my exasperated parents — had I been born 20 years later, I doubtless would have been diagnosed with something, but in those days I was just a “rambunctious” boy — I came to learn the definition of the word rambunctious because of the frequency with which it was ascribed to me). But on this particular day at church, I was paying enough attention to notice that the speaker was crying. And I asked the nearest adult (probably Mom) what the speaker was sad about.

“She’s not sad,” Mom explained. “She’s crying because she’s happy.”

In hindsight, the crying woman was probably experiencing a complex stew of emotions, which may or may not have included happiness. But that’s hard to explain to a rambunctious 7 year old (or whatever I was), and so Mom (or grandma, or whoever it was) boiled it down to single word — happy.

And so for the next I-don’t-know-how-many years, I was given to understand that people cry for one of two reasons: because they’re happy or because they’re sad. Which is just as well, since I probably lacked the vocabulary at that time (and now, for that matter) to describe the vast range of emotions that human beings experience. (The Inside Out movies would have helped me.)

My understanding would eventually evolve to understand that people, including me, can be brought to tears by virtually anything — including the fates of fictional characters and countless other irrational stimuli.

And so when I tell you that I cried at Sophie’s wedding but not upon learning that Hannah and Emma had eloped, you really should not read anything into that.

I don’t know exactly why I cried at Sophie’s wedding, but I’m pretty sure the reason had to do with more than unmitigated happiness. And had I actually been present when Hannah and Emma got married, I probably would have cried there, too. Even if the precise blend of happiness, and love, and nostalgia, and hope, and bittersweetness, and general overwhelm would likely have generated slightly different flavors of tears at the two occasions, there would have been tears, and it would not have been entirely incorrect for an onlooker to explain to her confused son, “He’s crying because he’s happy.”

Two months ago, I had no married daughters. Now I have two.

This is Hannah’s second marriage. Like Hannah’s former husband, Emma is a redhead. (I’m probably trying to read more into that than there is, but there might be something to it.) Unlike Hannah’s former husband, Emma is a returned missionary. (Like Crystal, she served in the Philippines.)

It’s an unspoken thing in our culture (and maybe not all that unspoken) that fathers want their daughters to marry someone who has served a mission. In those rare instances when I’m being completely honest with myself, I think that it is something I have always desired in my daughters’ spouses. Not because never-missionaries cannot be wonderful people (of course they can) or because returned missionaries are uniformly good (of course we are not). But because marriage — especially marriage between young people — is, to use a gambling analogy no one would ever use at church, a bet on the come. You’re betting that this kid in their 20s will eventually develop into someone you’re going to want to be yoked to 10, 20, 50, a thousand years from now. You don’t have a lot of information to bet on at that stage of life. But notwithstanding the caveats mentioned earlier in this paragraph, the data suggest that mission status (especially for boys) is a reasonably reliable indicator of what kind of guy you’re getting.

All this is to say that I’m happy Hannah finally married a returned missionary — even if he turned out not to be a he. Emma is a lovely person. Any father-in-law would be lucky to have her.

Back Surgery No. 2

Speaking of wedded bliss, and maybe it’s just me, but Crystal and I seem to talk a lot more about the frequency and quality of bowel movements in this, our 31st year of marriage, than we did in our first.

Our latest interest in this particular bodily function came in the wake of Crystal’s second back surgery and her resulting week-to-ten-day relationship with opioid painkillers.

On Monday, January 6th, Crystal underwent something called a L3-L4-L5 laminectomy, which according to Google AI, is “a surgical procedure that removes bone from the L3, L4, and L5 vertebrae to relieve pressure on the spinal cord and nerves.”

Google AI has told me a number of patently (and sometimes hilariously) false things, but the definition above aligns well with how the doctor described it, so I’m inclined to use it.

This operation follows the “L4-L5 microdiscectomy” Crystal underwent last year, which, again according to Google AI, is “a surgical procedure to remove a herniated disk between the L4 and L5 vertebrae in the lower back.”

Sounds about right.

Last year’s surgery was successful in the sense that it repaired the herniation between L4 and L5 and relieved a lot of Crystal’s pain, but it did not fix the problem of her not being able to walk without her foot flopping.

The purpose behind removing the bone in the laminectomy was to clear out enough space for whatever nerve is tasked with making her lower leg muscles work correctly.

Or so I gather.

The weather on January 6th was, in a word, awful. Blizzard conditions meant that the drive to the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, normally a half-hour trip, instead took a solid 90 minutes, and perhaps longer. The plows were out, but it was snowing hard, and I couldn’t even make out the lane markings on I-95. The highway was just a vast, snowy expanse with cars taking seemingly random paths across it. Every mile or two we’d pass a car in a ditch on the side of the road, or stuck on an exit ramp, or otherwise incapacitated. We’d pass these cars and I’d grip the steering wheel a little tighter as the ice and snow slowly accumulated on the wiper blades, which cleared a progressively smaller segment of the windshield with each stroke. By the time we reached Baltimore, I was struggling to peer through what seemed like a two-square-inch opening. I was inclined to pull over and clean the wiper blades at several points along the way, but I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to get back on the road again.

The resulting 8 or so inches of snow (depending where you were) had the predictable impact of shutting down the government for the day (except for Congress — it was January 6th, the appointed date for Congress to gather and certify the results of last year’s presidential election — something they have somehow now managed to do 59 out 60 times in U.S. history without incident) and shutting down schools for the next three days (with a delayed opening on the fourth day).

This made life a little easier for Crystal, as it meant three and a half fewer days of having to come up with lesson plans for her substitute teacher.

It also elicited the predictable eye rolls from newcomers to the area. The man conducting sacrament meeting the following Sunday pointed out that where he’s from, nothing would have been cancelled for the amount of snow we got, blah, blah, blah, yada yada yada. These observations all follow the same basic formula:

“In [fill-in-the-blank sparsely populated frozen hellscape] where I’m from, we never cancel school/church/community events on account of the weather. Why, once, I remember running the Buffalo Marathon in whiteout conditions with six feet of snow on the ground. I seem to recall a few of the runners from out of town complaining about it. But for us locals, it was just another Saturday in May.”

What’s amusing is that every single person who makes variations of this observation seems to be operating under the same misapprehension that those of us who have lived here a long time haven’t heard it a hundred times before.

We get it — we don’t deal with winter weather very well around here. We. Get. It.

I don’t know what the Montgomery County Public Schools policy on school closures it, but it seems to be that “if there is a non-zero chance of any of the 160,000 students in the county slipping on any patch of ice anywhere, then we cancel.”

Works for me.

But notwithstanding the conditions, when we arrived at the hospital in downtown Baltimore at little after 7 a.m. we found it operating just like any other day. It both amazed me and reminded me that I’ve never really had a job where it matters whether I actually show up to work on any given day. It filled me with gratitude for doctors, nurses, and other professionals who show up and do their jobs well, no matter the weather.

Crystal checked into the same-day surgery center, and then spent the next several hours getting visited by a unending stream of people all asking her the same dozen or so questions: Who are you? When were you born? Do you understand what we are doing to you today? When did you eat last? …

Sometime between 10 and 11 a.m., once the entire population of Baltimore had been adequately apprised of Crystal’s life history, she was wheeled back to the operating room and I took up residence in probably the nicest hospital waiting area I’ve ever visited — a lovely eight-story atrium whose palm trees were a nice contrast to the snow outside.

I took a couple of work calls in there with my camera on. People thought I was dialing in from vacation.

The surgeon came out a little before noon to tell me the procedure had gone well — that he’d been able to “clear out a lot of space” — and that I’d be able see Crystal in a couple of hours.

I took a picture of Crystal while she was waking up, which I’m sure she’s delighted to have me post on the internet.

She experienced a small amount of cerebrospinal fluid leakage — not uncommon after a second spinal surgery — and so they kept her overnight to get that under control, and we did not get home until dinnertime on Tuesday.

The intervening three weeks have seen her recover, but not as quickly as after the first procedure. I guess it should not surprise me that a procedure that involves removing actual bone from one’s spinal column would require more recovery than one that simply clears out a herniated disc.

For the first several days, it was all she could do just to survive from one Oxy dose to the next. Hence all of our many in-depth conversations about bowel movements.

So easy has been my life (so far) that I have never experienced pain that could not be effectively managed by ibuprofen and/or extra-strength Tylenol. I have a hard time relating to people who get addicted to harder stuff. I also don’t understand how people become dependent on it without literally dying of constipation.

Anyway, she’s doing much better. The Oxy is a distant memory and bowel movements are back to normal! I still hear her foot flopping when she walks on the treadmill, but it really does seem to be gradually getting better. The nurse practitioner at Crystal’s follow-up visit this week told her it would likely take 6 to 9 months for the nerve damage to fully heal itself (or at least to heal itself as much as it’s going to).

So she has that to look forward to. But I’m fairly certain that Crystal’s days of elective back surgery are behind her now.

Now Crystal is just waiting for the results of her latest breast biopsy. She’s an old pro at this. Because it is a status she is reluctant to claim, most of Crystal’s friends don’t know that she has technically been a breast cancer survivor for the past decade or so. But that’s a story for another time.

The Kids are All Right

I’ve told you about Hannah, who in addition to being newly married, continues to enjoy her work as Director of Nursing at Covington Senior Living in Orem (or maybe Lehi — or one of those place in Utah County that all run together along that segment of I-15 and are basically indistinguishable from one another). Apparently a certain apostle’s wife toured the place last week to determine whether she wants her parents to live there.

It was a “no swearing day,” Hannah explained.

Hannah and Emma also just adopted an oriental fire-bellied toad, bringing the total number of animals living in their apartment up to approximately 153.

Ari seems pretty happy most of the time and is in the process of writing their own letter. So stay tuned for that.

Sophie and Luke seem to be settling into their first month of married bliss. She has started student teaching (and also substitute teaching, I think) in Provo. I’m sure she’ll clear up the details in her letter.

They also apparently went to Las Vegas this month for some reason.

Grace is about to begin her new job tutoring at the SVU’s campus writing center. This supplements her income from working at Chick-fil-A on Saturdays, but she had to cut back her hours there because of opera rehearsals on weeknights. I can’t remember which opera — I’ve never heard of it — but I’m looking forward to next month’s performances.

Finally, my friend Richard and I reprised our non-partisan quadrennial tradition of watching the inauguration from “We The Pizza” on Capitol Hill (305 Pennsylvania Ave., SE — three blocks from the Capitol).

Four years ago, we rode our bikes to Biden’s inauguration, which was a blast. This year, we wussed out and drove because it was so unbearably cold. It pains me to admit it, but driving was probably the right call.

Hopefully in four years we’ll have better weather — and a better president 🙂

Love,
Tim