Well, it’s a little after the fact, but I wanted to start a blog about this ranch thing that I just signed paperwork for last Friday. To do it justice, we’ll have to go back in time a little bit. Well, maybe more than a little bit, let’s go back about 10 years in fact.
So, it was August 2001 and I’d just finished a round of chemo. I was in the hospital in reverse isolation on 4West at Alta Bates when I met the woman of my dreams. Literally, the woman of my dreams. 3 months before that day I’d had an amazingly vivid dream where I saw myself and this mystery woman sitting on a log in Nova Scotia talking with my parents. I could picture certain things about her quite clearly; her hands, her teeth, her eyes and hair. Odds things to fix on, but that’s how it was. So back in the hospital room, I wake up to find a nurse changing my IV bag of antibiotics (since I have next to no immune system at this point in time), it’s about 2 in the afternoon I would guess. A couple of blinks of my eyes and I see her face and something makes me look at her teeth. This isn’t something I normally do, but I did. They were the teeth from the woman in my dreams. Oh oh. Check the hands, then the eyes, then the hair. Yup – they match. Oh shit. What do you do, exactly, when you find the woman of your dreams changing your bag of IV antibiotics? Well, assuming that I was going to end up marrying her, I decided to stand up and check her out more fully – find out how tall she was, what build she had, whether overall she might be a good mate. Sure enough, just a little shorter than me, hard to see an actual build in nurses scrubs but she didn’t look bad, that’s for sure. By now she’s getting an odd vibe from me and I may have tried to start a conversation, don’t remember exactly, but she hightailed it out of the room and didn’t come back for a while. Later she claimed it was because she was really busy, but I think she was really trying to avoid me since I was acting so strange. Later that day my IV goes bad and she has to come in and give me a new one. She’s pretty good with the needles but not very organized – keeps losing track of the things she needs to finish the job. Somewhere in there I find out she’s just come back from Southeast Asia after selling all her belongings and going walkabout for 6 months. Lucky for me she came back I guess. I don’t have to nerve to ask her out or anything and she leaves. I don’t see her again that day, and the next she isn’t working and I’m released to go home. Before going, however, I write her a note and draw some flowers on it. Why flowers? Don’t know, but I was definitely in a state of appreciating life – after chemo you appreciate everything.
Couple of days go by at home and she doesn’t respond to my note (which had my address and phone number). I get some flowers and managed to leave them at the nurses station and convince someone there to give me her phone number. I manage to catch up with her the next day but she gives me some song and dance about not dating patients. I tell her that I’m not her patient anymore so it’s ok – didn’t work. I don’t give up though and call her again 2 days later. This time she agrees to go out with me and we agree to meet at one of her haunts in the city later in the week.
I’ll continue the romance story later, want to write some about the ranch right now…