I had outpatient surgery the other day and came home with a long list of things I was supposed to keep track of. Among them, I am supposed to wear compression sleeves on my legs at night, take six medications at various intervals, and use a walker. And my left leg does not want to operate itself. It wants to be lifted up and carried around.

I made up the bed in the spare room so as not to cause trouble for my husband at night. However, the sheets that were clean were some random knitted sheets, and I discovered as I tried to retire for the night, that these sheets were almost velcro-like in their ability to entangle me and prevent me from sliding around in the bed. Combined with my left leg’s inability to move individually, this was fairly catastrophic. I couldn’t fix the sheets at midnight so I had to lie still and rest.

The next complication was that the circulation sleeves had little buzzers that went off as they inflated but they weren’t inflating at exactly the same time. In fact as the night slowly passed I concluded that the timers were first converging and then diverging in their starting point. This caused some super modern music moments when the second buzzer started just after the first one and at a slightly lower note. **

When I had to get up around 2 a.m. and walk down the hall I felt like Buzz Lightyear, with the little green lights and pulsing all wrapped around my lower extremities. That was nothing to how I felt the next night when one of the lights on the compression sleeve stayed green and the other turned red and started blinking and pinging. Fortunately, the whole contraption turned off before I totally lost the program.

The third night the lights on both legs started blinking red with an extra blue light on when I got up. Hmm. At that point I decided that reading the instruction manual (in the morning) might be appropriate.

Should I admit that this third night was the first night where I had managed to look at the compression sleeves, notice that there was a big L and a big R, and then apply the sleeves to those legs with those letters right side up? Which meant that this was the first night that the sleeves were remotely in the right relationship to my legs?

Turns out, red lights mean that the charge is running out. Blue lights mean that the sleeve isn’t able to compress to the leg in 20 seconds. Interesting. It has a touch sensor that is supposed to keep it from squashing me when it inflates. When the sleeves were upside down this whole system did not work and the green lights just stayed on. I thought it was a fancy system for letting me walk around at night with my own personal night lights. That had been very important the first night when I also discovered that my walker wouldn’t go into the bathroom without being turned sideways. Since the doorway to the bathroom and the head of the stairwell are next to each other, this is not a place I wanted to be hanging around in the dark when I wasn’t well-balanced.

The too large walker came from the doc’s office. I had been loaned another walker and the next morning when I checked I discovered that it did go through the door, straight up. (The door is also, noticeably, narrower than normal, once you look…) So now, several nights later I have it all worked out. Smooth sheets, walker that goes all the way down the hall, compression sleeves turned off when I get up in the night, left leg deigning to move on its own occasionally. Progress!

** But here is my favorite video of different waves coming together and then moving apart again. Just because.