True for all of us, and especially true for those of us with more than a few trips around the sun.
Early in the morning a little more than two weeks ago I received a phone call from my daughter-in-law. Any call that comes in that early and starts out, “We’re okay” is guaranteed to be serious. My wife, who had been in Ohio helping out while my son was out of the country on a business trip, had been dealing with our granddaughter’s first anniversary of her bone marrow transplant (that’s the good news) and a case of the flu that ran through the entire family (that’s the beginning of the bad news). All four kids and Suzanne got the bug, and Suzanne, trying to help out as best she could, got so weak that she fell in the middle of the night of the third and again in the early morning of the fourth. Hence the call. She had significant bruises along her right side starting with her face, some damage to her shoulder, and two broken bones in her foot. I was on the road to Cincinnati as soon as I could get the dogs boarded at the vet’s.
One night in the hospital and two weeks of rehab and we were back home. It’s taken a few days to begin to settle into a routine. She’s in a wheelchair for some undetermined amount of time and after that will be in a boot for another undetermined amount. Her progress has been remarkable, but she was in pretty bad shape at the beginning – broken foot, messed up shoulder, facial bruising, and the flu. She was in isolation at the rehab center for the first five days until they were sure she wasn’t contagious.
Here at home, all the bedrooms are on the second floor (as is the laundry room). Fortunately, the house has an open floor plan, so moving around downstairs is possible. Not easy, but possible. We now have two wheelchairs, a walker, a bench for the shower, a commode that sits over our toilet, and a slide board. And a ramp leading to the family room, and another out the front door. And a hospital bed. There’s a real comedy of errors story about the hospital bed that I’ll get to soon.
Tomorrow morning we have an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon to assess her condition. Tomorrow afternoon we have our first home visit from a physical therapist. I’m driving, of course, and since it’s her right foot, I’m assuming I’ll be her driver for the foreseeable future. Driver, cook, dishwasher, laundry, the pets, etc. This is the “in sickness and in health” part. This is what we do for each other; what our partner needs, we provide. Giving and receiving are two sides of the same coin.
Our friends have been great. Visits, food, offers of help, all that we could hope for from the fine group of people that surround us.
Those of you who have read the Boone Series will understand this last bit. I’m glad I had finished Books Five and Six before this happened. Otherwise, it would have changed the focus of significant parts of those two books, and that would have shifted the emphasis of the entire series. I like it just fine the way it stands, and, while it might still have been a good story, it wouldn’t have been the one I ended up writing.
I’ll be writing more as we progress through this new chapter. I’m sure there’ll be more to tell along the way.
To be continued . . . . .