Activities at Riverview have taken on their normal pace since the end of the season. All of the cottages have been cleaned and put in sleep mode for the summer. We even know how many towels we are missing. I would hate to think what the number might have been had we put our logo on them. Years ago, I learned the hard way that the Ritz Carlton doesn’t give away their fluffy bath robes. I still have mine at the price of $200 back then.

Jerry and the burning crew had a safe and productive controlled woods burn, and we got beneficial rains shortly after finishing which diminished needle drop.
The two Andys, Hay and Moss, have begun the process of determining how many new dogs we will need to train and purchase after determining how many of our older dogs need to retire. I kind of know how those old dogs feel.

Greg and the ag crew are off to a great start on the blueberries with good prices and yields. We have yet to get into peak harvest but are managing to keep about 80 blueberry pickers busy. We will probably pick blueberries until late May, and then switch to our blackberries. As of now, we have yet to determine whether our seriously cold weather over Christmas when our temps got down to near zero degrees killed our citrus trees. They sure look dead, but we will know more later in the spring.

However, what I really wanted to talk about on this blog is ME. An old mentor of mine once told me, “Son a toothache in my mouth is worse than a famine in China.” I know what he’s talking about since I just had total hip replacement surgery on April 12th. A late great Southern humorist, Lewis Grizzard, wrote a book about his first open heart surgery. He aptly titled the book, “They Tore Out My Heart, and Stomped That Sucker Flat.”

Hospitals are an enigma to me. They make you arrive WAY BEFORE your surgery time, and then proceed to relieve you of all of your dignity. Once you put the backless gown on, you are history. Having never been a woman, I had no idea how to prevent flashing myself, but the worst was yet to come. Seeing as my surgeon very correctly chose the anterior approach, the nurses had to clean an area that soon made me forget my embarrassment over showing my fanny.

Hospitals also have “woke” terms like this may sting a bit which is Arabic for grab ahold of the bed rails, and place some of your bedding in your mouth to keep from screaming like a sissy. Another thing that hospitals do that makes me sometimes question their IQ, at every station in the process, the patient is asked what he or she is there for. After the 6th nurse, anesthesiologist, or doctor asked me the same question, I said, “Look, just hand me a magic marker, and I will mark the correct hip, and what I’m here for.” By now, I’m beginning to wonder if I might come out of surgery with a perfectly good knee being replaced.

I’m proud to say that my surgeon who probably wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s license did a great job, and so I went from there to my hospital bedroom. My eldest child, Holly, stayed with me that night in the hospital, and I’m recuperating at her home until I get my stitches out on April 27th, but that’s a story for later in the blog. Since I had a spinal block, I was lucid, and in absolutely no pain. I said to myself that this was going to be a breeze. However, around midnight the spinal block wore off, and God allowed me to remember that my body had undergone major trauma. For the rest of that night, the dab of morphine and Percocet couldn’t touch the pain, but I just rode it out until it became bearable. At daylight, two sadists from PT came in. They forced me to walk up and down the hall on my walker with my Fanny hanging out, and then I had to walk up and down a flight of stairs. These two folks will NOT BE on my Christmas gift list.

At 9:30 that morning, I was dismissed from the hospital. In all of my years of going to chemo treatments and clinical trials with Martha, I learned that it was much easier to break into a hospital than out of one. That was not the case here, and I was really impressed with Colquitt Regional Hospital.

So then we went home to Holly’s house where I will stay until I see my surgeon next week. I am much more accustomed to making rules rather than following them. But, let me describe this home to you. Holly is a non-practicing lawyer while her husband, Cliff, is in a family practice here in Moultrie. They have three dogs including my Rebel, three cats, and three 17-year-old triplet children. I feel as though I have been dropped right in the middle of a tornado. The great news is that I only needed my walker for one day; so the animals didn’t get much of a chance to trip me.

My biggest obstacle was my own flesh and blood. Her mother always told me that she was the child most like me in personality, but I think the other two also gave her a run for the money. Holly has cared for me tremendously well, but she can go from Florence Nightingale to Attila the Hun in about a nanosecond if I’m not doing what she thinks I should!

However, under her care, I’m making tremendous progress, and could not have done that without her and her family. I wish each of you an enjoyable spring and summer, and may God bless you and your families!