Albatross' Blurty

Apheresis Again

One good thing about apheresis, it gets me blogging! Stuck in a chair with my left arm immobilized, it's pretty nice just tapping away at the keyboard with my right hand. The hard part is the needle-stick, where things usually go wrong if they're going to. The next tricky bit is near the end, when the needle tends to clot up, and it becomes a race to finish off the donation before my blood stops going through the system.

Last week was busy. No, it was really a circus. It began on August 29th, when we moved The Young Man into his dorm in Wisconsin. It was a big day for him, and when it came time for us to go, I could tell he was torn between not wanting us to leave, and wanting us to leave. We had spent the morning moving him in (a nice second-story dorm) and wandering the campus and the nearby town, and finally we were out of stalling tactics and it was time to go.

I really couldn't believe we were there, playing out a middle-class ritual that I had never experienced, Dropping Off at the Dorm. I had my own car when I moved out, so I don't remember such an event in my life. Although honestly my memory is so poor and i was so young and self-centered it may have happened and I don't remember!

But it was good and sad and exciting and dreadful and everything one must expect from the timely departure of one's beloved son from the nest. I wouldn't change anything, but I wouldn't mind another five or ten years of my kids being this age, living at home, either. It struck me a few years ago that I was living through some of the happiest days of my life, and I'm not looking forward to four years from now when The Boy (title held now my youngest) moves out.

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