Our air conditioning broke, and I spent a couple of nights
sleeping in my recliner in the family room. My version of MS includes severe
heat sensitivity. This means that exposure to high temperatures or even a
slight fever reduce me quickly to wheelchair only movement, even around the
house. The family room is easily 10 degrees cooler than the bedroom, and cross ventilation
plus ceiling fan make it tolerable except on the hottest nights.
When I arose after the first night, I put the pillow I had
been using, and the fleece throw that I had retrieved in the middle of the
night on the floor next to my chair; the throw crumpled up compactly on top of
the pillow. In the middle of the second high-heat night, it had cooled down
enough to again require the fleece throw; it was gone. My dear wife, who daily
helps me in all ways deal with the both the obvious and the insidious
depredations of MS, cannot abide the appearance of a blanket neatly crumpled on
the floor, and hid it from me when I wasn’t looking. Looking around a dark room
for a small dark green blanket in the middle of the night is frustrating. It
involves using the flashlight on my phone, while muttering under my breath
things about said darling helpmate that would never be said aloud during the
light of day. It is then doubly frustrating to discover that she has
diabolically hidden the blanket folded neatly in the last place I would think
of looking for it—almost directly under my head on the back of my chair.
She claims that the inability to find things in plain sight
is all part and parcel of Y-chromosome syndrome. I think she must take some
secret pleasure in frustrating me. Come to think of it, she has successfully frustrated
me by hiding my blanket on the back of my chair several times in the past. She’s
an extremely bright person; you’d think she’d get it by now.
