Steps to the Second Floor

There are 16 steps leading upstairs from front hall to bedrooms.

How long does it take to go up (or down) 16 steps? Ten seconds? Fifteen? It certainly takes me less than half a minute to get from the couch to my bedroom most of the time.

I took Beast to the spine surgeon's office today. He saw the surgeon about two weeks ago, and after the doc had time to look over Beast's records, he wanted him to have one more cortisone injection in his spine with his needle-guy. So, that was this morning. This doctor didn't give Beast any general anesthetic (unlike every other one he's ever had), so he was fully awake and had only (very) local anesthetic. When they came to the waiting room to get me, he'd only been back there for ten minutes, at most. He was in absolutely the most pain I've seen him in for the past week or more, because there's so much inflammation and the addition of a syringe or so of liquid in a space where it had nowhere to be. But we got home ok, and I headed off to work.

When I got home at about 6:30, I started collecting the household garbage before I realized that Beast needed to get upstairs to bed NOW.

"NOW" means that at 7:45, I was finally dragging the garbage can and recycling bins to the end of the driveway.

• Ten minutes, and a Percocet, to get out of the recliner.
• Five minutes to cross the living room, front hall and reach the bottom of the stairs.
• Approximately 25 minutes later, Beast was sprawled on the floor at the top of the steps.
• About twenty minutes after that, he had made it to bed and was sitting on the edge of it emptying his pants pockets.
• And ten minutes after that, I told him I was going to go do the garbage and I'd bring his cell phone and some water upstairs.

When I came back in, he had dropped off to sleep.

I let him rest for about half an hour and then went back up to make sure he got his CPAP going.

I've been home two and a half hours and it feels like either 30 minutes or all day.