Eleven days after surgery I was released into the care of my wife. She was scheduled to leave in a few days due to her teaching obligations but by then my second shift of caretakers would be there. My brother Rolf and his wife Irmgard were due to arrive and stay with me for a week, so everything would be OK.

The apartment had a restaurant on the lower floor so we went downstairs for dinner, but I found even this short trip to be a daunting task. It took me a long time to make it down the hall and I felt that even the restaurant food tasted strangely, robbing me of my appetite. The next day my brother arrived and we went for a walk around the apartment grounds on a sunny autumn day. Getting exercise by walking frequently was something I had been asked to do as part of my physical therapy. I found that this amount of walking was more than I could manage and I was very much short of breath. In fact, I was breathing worse than I had been breathing during the first week after surgery and this proved to be very discouraging. We didn’t understand why this was but accepted it as a natural cycle of the healing process.

After my wife departed, Rolf and Irmgard offered to drive me to Cape Cod, a place I had never visited before. The weather was still sunny and unseasonably warm so I agreed. We found the roads out of Boston were very bad and bumpy and so I endured significant pain on the trip. I tried to sit sideways in the back of the car to avoid jolts to my rib cage. We stopped for lunch a few miles short of our target but it was evident to me that I couldn’t manage the trip and would be better off in bed. They gracefully agreed to cut the trip short. My recovery was their primary concern and since my progress had slowed down from the first week after surgery, perhaps rest was what I needed most.

During my time at the apartment my condition seemed to get worse and worse. I experienced spells of extreme hot and cold. Sometimes there simply weren’t enough blankets to stop me from shivering and other times I was so hot I had to throw off the sheets. Something was clearly not right and as I discovered later, my condition had turned serious enough to warrant hospitalization. I truthfully felt that I had been stronger and had felt better during the first week after surgery than I was feeling now and this was a source of major concern to all of us.