There was a diaper pail in the far corner of the balcony, and I walked over and deposited the diaper. I had nearly replaced the lid when I noticed something small and gray among the rolled-up balls of white. Shaking my head, I reached down and extracted my sister’s pug, Baxter.

As was often the case with narcoleptics, Baxter was fast asleep.

I shook him, his beady eyes finally opening, and I said, “Of all the places to take a nap.”

He panted in reply.

I set him down, and he scurried in through the door where he promptly began chasing Clark around the living room. I watched the two play for a few minutes until Baxter’s body went limp and he somersaulted a few times before coming to rest against a bookshelf. I took a little off for the landing, but it was still a solid 9.2.

I checked the time on my watch—it was nearly noon—and said, “I think it’s time for someone else’s nap.”

Clark fought me for his requisite twenty minutes, but by 12:15 p.m. he was down and out.

I grabbed the baby monitor and made my way to the carpet in the living room and began doing my daily rehab.

Two years earlier, I was involved in a crash. Not a car. A hot-air balloon. I counted myself lucky that a sprained knee was my only injury. The other two occupants fared far worse. Wheeler, the small-town veterinarian I was dating at the time, broke her arm in two places, and the third occupant, well, let’s just say that he’s doing his best Stephen Hawking impression.

I moved to France a month after the crash. At the time, I’d recently gotten back into shape—after gaining nearly forty pounds—and was running five miles a day. But my knee continued to bug me. Finally, at the constant urging of Lacy, I went to get an MRI.

The verdict: a torn meniscus.

I wasn’t a stranger to hospitals, having been shot twice, fallen off a cliff into the Atlantic Ocean, been technically dead for seven minutes, collapsed a lung, and most recently, been attacked by a pack of wolves. So I put off surgery for over a year. But it finally got to the point where I could hardly chase after Clark without my knee doubling in size.

I was initially scheduled to go under the knife in early March, but a few weeks before surgery, Lacy had one of her worst MS flare-ups in years. Lacy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis her junior year in college, and she’d had several bad flare-ups in the following years, the most severe resulting in two months of temporary blindness.