Life on the outside: If 300 million Chinese don't care, why should I?

Back when we bought the house we're currently living -- back when big money loans were easy and everyone was buying houses and then adding on, believing the houses would always appraise for more and never dreaming the housing market would crash - we joined the lemmings and added on a truly master suite.
Years later, MG and I would lie in bed thinking about what had happened to the housing market and say, "MG, we could have cut this bedroom by a third, still had plenty of room, and saved ourselves thousands of dollars."
Always she'd answer, "Some day when I'm old and an invalid, I want to have room for my children and friends to come gather around me, sitting comfortably in their chairs, not feeling like they have to get out because it's so crowded."
And of course I'd think, "by the time that happens, who knows where we'll be living?"
Once again, MG was right.

After 22 days in the hospital, nearly two weeks in a medically induced coma and on a ventilator, we were cleared to bring MG home.
We couldn't wait. But it wasn't easy.
For all the practice we had in using her "sliding board" - the means to move from bed to wheelchair, and wheelchair to regular chair or toilet or car seat - practicing in the hospital under the direction and care of the physical therapists and actually doing it for real proved to be about as different as dunking over LaBron James in a video game and actually facing him on a real basketball court.
And while you might think it not so difficult to get around without being able to put feet on the floor, I was surprised at just how necessary our feet are in even the simplest activities, such as sliding on a board from one location to another.
Needless to say, we wore MG out Saturday. But we came home to our kids, her father, and one of her sisters, and everyone was able to sit around the bed, talking and laughing and calling family and friends.

We got her settled into our new sleeping arrangements - her hospital bed pushed up against our bed, side-by-side but with the bed guardrail in between us.
It made me think of the old Puritan tradition of the running a plank or board down a bed between unmarried couples to keep them from touching. I sleep on one side of the rail and MG sleeps on the other. From time to time she will roll  up on her side to change positions for a few minutes (the most she can stand it) and we come face-to-face with the bars between us. It's actually kind of funny. I tell her it only makes her miss me more.
In truth, I think it's the other way around.

Sunday was a great day. MG's sister was, once upon a time in one of her many previous lives, a hair dresser of sorts. By that, I mean she went to school to learn to be a hair dresser but I don't think she every actually practiced professionally (although she has been known to give us all haircuts from time to time, in moments of either desperation or extreme cheapness/laziness).
MG has had this big knot of hair in the back of her head that the nurses had not been able to untangle. They'd been pulling bits of glass out of that knot for two weeks, and we've tried - as best we could in a hospital bed - to use shampoo and conditioner and brushes and combs and get it all out.
Sunday, we put her in the wheel chair that reclines and put her over the tub, where MG's sister washed and combed and cut what MG referred to as her "rat's nest" out.
It turns out there was a pretty good cut on the back of MG's head that nobody knew about (and, no, the sister didn't do it!), just another of the new "insults" we're discovering daily. There are these little stitches in various places around MG's body. I guess they are places where drainage tubes were removed and doctors put in a single stitch to pull the skin together. And at one point MG's right side was hurting and she didn't realize she'd broken one rib on that side, too.
In fact, I haven't gone over the full extent of her injuries with her because she doesn't want to know. Mainly, in odd moments when she talks about something hurting that she hadn't noticed before - her lower back, her ribs, whatever - I will slip in there, "well you know you broke your ribs on that side'' or "you know you broke your pelvis in the back, too" - never mentioning just how many ribs or how many places she broke bones.
And I won't show her pictures of the car until she's ready - which may be never. I was looking at pictures of the car again today. I keep going back to them with a curiosity that I guess can only be described as 'morbid.'

MG asked SB to go find her curling iron. SB came back with her own curling iron.
"Where's my curling iron?" MG asks.
"It was bent,'' SB said.
"How could it have been bent?" MG said.
It had to have been the accident. Her bag was in the left rear passenger seat. The impact was enough to bend a curling iron.
I see the way the side of the car was cut away by the emergency personnel. I see the way the windshield was shattered and hanging inward, toward the front seat. I see the air bags deployed and hanging deflated.
And I wonder again how she was able to survive.

One of our nieces sent MG a message that "when you're sick, that's when you put on your bling!" So MG dressed in new pajamas, put on make-up, and hung all these Mardi Gras beads we'd collected the last few years in Gulfport and Biloxi for a picture.
She smiled. She looked wonderful. For a minute, everything looked great.

(You ever see a hotter looking woman just a week out of a coma? I didn't think so!)

But as soon as the pictures were taken, she was exhausted.
Still, it was fun.
We did wear her out Sunday, which made Sunday night a long, hard night for both of us. And as MG's body begins to mend, pain returns. Nerve endings start to reconnect; ligaments that were stretched start to pull back into place; bones settle where they're supposed to be ... all good things.
But they all hurt, too.

Life on the outside ... at times, I feel like a prisoner who has been set free. Although it was only three weeks living on the ninth floor of the trauma unit, living there among other people who were there because a loved one was injured and suffering made it easy to think the whole world was full of injured and suffering people.
Now that I'm on the outside, it strikes me as odd how many people don't know of MG's injury. I see an old friend at the check-out line of the Western and he asked about MG and says to be sure to tell her 'hello,' and I know he doesn't know. I don't tell him.
I take my dog to get trimmed because he's shedding, and the girl at the pet place has no idea of what I've been going through the last three weeks.
The boys and I shop at Wal-Mart for some items to make MG's life easier, and nobody there knows or cares why we're there or what we're after.
That's as it should be. I am not the center of the universe. Neither is MG. And I consider all those times I shopped at the grocery store or went to the pet place or took the kids to Wal-Mart and now I wonder who around me was suffering? Who was there because they or someone they love was in pain?
And should I know? Should I be held responsible? How should this experience change the way I interact with total strangers who cross my path every day?
Am I expecting too much from this? Expecting too much of myself?
Thinking too much?
Yes.
And no.

The existentialist writer Albert Camus wrote in "The Rebel:" "Only a personal God can be asked by the rebel for a personal accounting."
For some reason, that brings me comfort. I can ask God "why" and know that because I believe in a personal God who cares, I can ask. If I didn't believe, what would be the sense of even asking?
I'm not sure why that brings me a sense of peace, but it does.