My wife believes it’s possible to jinx good fortune or success. So she would never have written the words that opened my last post. She’d say I caused the increase in pain that followed on Saturday and Sunday. She’s like a baseball player who won’t mention the fact that his pitcher is working on a no-hitter through five innings and won’t sit near him on the bench in the seventh for fear of jinxing it. Interestingly, the logic doesn’t work in reverse: you can ruin good fortune by commenting it, but you can’t avoid bad fortune by noting how badly things are going. Doing that will only lead to more bad fortune.

It is true that when she and my younger son visited me in the hospital on Tuesday, they found me getting out of bed for the first time, working with Mary Jane the physical therapist. Up and down the hall, then back to the bed, before another foray out to make sure I remembered how to do stairs. I blythely say that everything has been going remarkably smoothly so far and then immediately jerk my left arm without thinking about it, wrenching free the IV. Blood spurts, a towel is found both to help me staunch the bleeding and cover it up, so my son doesn’t become upset. The nurse comes in and says that unfortunately she’ll have to have another one put in, because I’m still due one more dose of antibiotics. Which might delay my discharge. And the physical therapy would have to be completed later. Which might also delay my discharge.

In the end, it didn’t make that much of a difference, but it was a little uncanny.

Same (I hope) with the pain over the weekend. Today was better. I’m betting tomorrow will be better yet.