I picked Rich up at the hospital this morning and we had three of his college friends waiting at our house to help him make it up three steps into the house.  That might sound like overkill, but it snowed last night and things were slippery, and I knew if Rich had any kind of wobble, that there was no way I could stop him from falling.  Yesterday, in the restroom, he looked down, then looked up, and lost his balance (mainly from the pain medicines and the after-effects of anesthesia.  He had a nurse with him then, so I didn’t think it was too big of a stretch for him to lose his balance on outside snowy steps…We are lucky to have so many wonderful friends. They didn’t hesitate when I asked for help, and originally, we’d only asked two men, and then the third said he wanted to help as well, so we had lots of helpers.  They also brought one of their wives (the couple we go to movies with)…and she brought enough food to last us a very long time…There’s a really yummy chicken and mushroom casserole with rice, and a huge pan of pasta, cookies, salad and french bread.  I might have missed something they brought…they are so thoughtful, and we truly appreciated it.  I’d only gotten around to making up the couch so Rich could lay there when his friends were here, and baked a batch of cookies…The cookies were Nestles Toll House that you find in the biscuit area of the refrigerator section of your supermarket.  I bought them last weekend, thinking they’d be a great treat for Rich…..I made them last night so we’d have them for Rich and his friends to snack on today.  So we did and everyone seemed to enjoy them (I always roll the chocolate chip ones in crushed walnuts before I bake them and they seem more homemade, to me.)   As soon as our friends left, the telephone rang, and it was our supermarket and Nestles Foods, telling us that the cookies we’d bought had been recalled and we should take them and the receipt back to the store I bought them….That might be a little tricky to do since we ate half of them…Apparently, there’s some kind of plastic (non-food) in the cookies.  They didn’t have to tell me that plastic was a non-food group, but apparently not everyone is aware of that fact.

They gave the codes of the recalled batches, but I couldn’t read the batch on my wrapper, so called the toll-free number Nestles provided, and was on hold for over 20 minutes, when they disconnected me.  There’s nothing more frustrating than being on hold, hearing that message, every two minutes, telling you to hold for the next available operator, only to hear dead air after twenty minutes, and then nothing.  Of course now I’ve given up on contacting them, because I’m not wasting another 20 minutes on cookies….I’m so mad though, because we ate them before we got  the message, and as I said before, we’d bought the cookies last weekend, so they had plenty of time to contact us before we ate them.  It’s a day in the life of Sandy…..nothing seems to go as planned.

Today, as they were releasing Rich, they decided to tell him that he’s feeling great now, but in a day or two, the pain killer they put inside his hip will have dissipated, and it will hurt like anything.  Good to know, and isn’t it nice that he felt wonderful while he had real nurses around him, and once he feels bad, I’ll be his nurse…Let’s just say I’m not very patient, and after a partial day of nursing, I know why I never pursued the field…I’d rather be his chief cook and bottle washer, and leave the nursing to the professionals…

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