Now I'm wounded in a more obvious way

I had a bike accident yesterday. Not a serious one, just scrapes and bruises and residual stiffness. But it's had the effect of amplifying my awareness of Sandy's absence. Anything that weakens or tires me makes the despair worse. I just don't have the reserves to withstand much buffeting right now.

But I'm also missing my nurse. Sandy knew a good deal about wound care, and she was very reassuring, very matter-of-fact, about tending to the results of my mishaps. She was also easily impressed by the purples and yellows and reds of bruises, and she loved watching them move and grow. When I broke a parking gate arm while riding my bicycle to work in 1998, Sandy sent me a bouquet of purple and red and blue flowers: bruise colors. Injuries were just another experience we shared and laughed about.

She mangled a finger in the stick blender this winter -
but I didn't take a photo until after it had been bandaged.
And we didn't dare remove the bandage because it had been
very difficult to stop the bleeding. But it was cool wrapping.

We often took photos of injuries, more for our own future gawking pleasure than to actually monitor healing progress or anything like that. There are far more photos of my wounds than hers because she was much more likely to grab the camera — and because I was usually ushering her to the car to go to Urgent Care when she was injured. I fell more routinely, and had more of the wounds that home care can handle. Sandy was more likely to have trauma — or, at least, trauma that we recognized as such. (We really should have gotten professional care when the garden pruners punctured my foot, but it was only a few days later that it occurred to us. Oops.)

I thought about taking photos last night. The bloody bits on my elbow were pretty impressive. This morning, the goose egg on my hip had taken on a lovely purple/white swirl. But there's not much point. They're not the kind of photos you share, really (especially the hip), and Sandy's not here to admire them.