12 Oakdale

  All it took was two weeks, and Grant feels mostly better. He was walking well enough last Saturday to try drinks at Aku Aku Tiki Bar, a hole-in-the-wall next to Lake Eola. We plan to try all the tiki bars mentioned in a recent Orlando Sentinel article. A mission. The previous Monday he ached so much that I called his doctor to try to get his pain meds adjusted. He could barely get out of bed or sit down to a chair.  We are worried that perhaps his hips are damaged even though the scans didn’t show any cracks. Tuesday he was somewhat better. Since he had an appointment Friday, he decided just to wait it out. After seeing his doctor, who is a resident, and her supervisor, we are much assured. They examined his hips, had him push and pull on their arms, watched him stand up, etc. Both agreed that he has deep tissue bruising but nothing that won’t heal fairly soon, a relative term for sure. He’s signed up for physical therapy and extensive blood work just to be sure his tremor i...

  As if we needed more rain, tropical storm Elsa went over Windermere during the early morning. Rain is supposed to fall all day. The Cuban tree frogs are croaking away. I had planned to buy bagels from Jeff’s Bagel Run, a new shop a couple of miles away in Ocoee. From a home business started from their kitchen in August, 2019, the owners have set up a brick and mortar shop which claims to have New York style bagels. They sell out by 9:00 each morning which either means the bagels are good, or locals don’t know any better. The only good bagels we’ve had south of NYC is at Sage Deli in Hallandale, which brought their oven, brick by brick, from their northern location. Unless the rain let’s up in the next hour, I’ll put off our test to another day. Grant ending up spending 36 hours in ER while cat scans were done and teams of trauma, neuro, and cardio doctors conferred. A second scan showed his subdural hematoma had not grown, but all agreed he should be admitted as soon as a bed wer...

In the rain this morning, Grant fell off his bike and hit his head. A neighbor called me, and someone called 911. It was just 5 minutes from our house. I think he slipped on the painted white line at the edge of the road, but he didn’t remember anything until the paramedics had him standing and getting ready to go to the emergency room. When I got there, he seemed dazed. He knew his name, but gave our Fort Lauderdale address for where he lived. Very scary. An hour later, at Orlando Regional Hospital, he was back to speed. A cat scan show a 3 millimeter subdural hematoma, so he has to stay until that gets resolved. It also showed no damage to spine or joints, so his rib, shoulder, and hip pains are miserable but superficial. His scraped elbow and knees got cleaned and bandaged: the gash in his forehead, I guess from his helmet which broke in the fall, got sutured.  The big deal is that he’s on blood thinners. The neurosurgeons want to reverse them to prevent any more bleeding. That ...

Four days sleeping in my own bed, and I have about recovered from our month away. We came home to a pile of meh mail and weeds everywhere. I’ve made my first attempt to uncover okra plants and toss all the restaurants flyers and solicitations for AC repair. If the thunderstorms hold off until this afternoon, I’ll weed the sunflowers and start on the native plant patch out front. Lots of volunteers there. Some will stay; much of the dog fennel will go. I’m ordering a “Pollinator Garden” sign from the Xerces Society so my neighbors think it’s not just a bunch of weeds, which I guess in most people’s eyes it is. Bugs got to eat too. I have decided we are buying a small travel trailer for future camping. We could skip the motels and eating out if we had a easy way to pull into a campground and set up quickly. I loved the made-in-Montreal Alta by Safari Condo we saw in Yellowstone. Owners Kim and Arty sweetly gave us a tour, touting the little unit’s featuring including solar, so many windo...