And Now for Something Completely Different

Abby and I did an obedience class last summer through to November and this is her class photo - she is the black and white English Springer Spaniel in the middle of the front row. It was a hoot to watch the instructors try to set up the dogs and to get them to stay.

I do have to be honest though - she is tied by her leash to the display unit because she absolutely refused to stay in one place - but she does look good, doesn't she?

Safe and Sound

Julie is finally at home, in her own house. Tonight, she might even get to sleep in her own bed. She was discharged at noon today so I took her home because Ryan doesn’t have a car downtown.

She probably has a few months until she is fully recovered but her ribs are feeling a lot better and her reliance on pain meds is reducing so those are good signs. She will see her doctor again in about 6 weeks for a follow-up.

Thanks for all of your thoughts and prayers over these last 5½ weeks. It feels like a lifetime has passed since January 14^th but we have been very blessed that she received great care and attention and is recuperating and will be back to her old self in short order.

Slowly but surely

We visited Julie yesterday and she was feeling quite a bit better. She has had her first physiotherapy session and while she is not very good at stairs, she was able to go up and down a few.

Doug, her former roommate has gone home and has been replaced by Gerry. He is in his 70s and had some surgery on his esophagus. Both he and his wife seem very nice.

The trauma team are pleased with her progress – her lungs are coming along, her ribs are feeling better, her liver is healing and her head scans are all clear.

Yesterday she was allowed off the ward so went for a coffee and cookie with a friend. The doctors have suggested she try a day pass this weekend and see how it goes. If she is doing well, she might be discharged home this coming week. If it doesn’t go well, she still has a bed at the hospital to come back to if they have to go to a Plan B. She did say this morning, however, that she thinks she might have overdone it a bit yesterday because this morning her back hurt so she was planning a quiet day.

Her doctor will be back on Tuesday so he has the final say. I have every confidence that whatever decision is made will be the right one for her.

Things seem to be looking up – after all it will be 5 weeks on Monday since the accident so she should start to feel better shortly.  Almost everything I have read suggests that around 6 weeks is when the ribs start to feel better so she is fast approaching that timeline. They changed her meds on Wednesday and that has made a huge difference – the pain control is better so she is able to do more etc.

I think that now she is getting better, my body has said “enough is enough”. I went to bed last night with a scratchy throat and woke up this morning with a head cold. At least this is a long weekend so I plan to do nothing except eat, sleep and read. I should probably do some laundry along the way but even that might have to wait!

Today's rant about relatives

Relatives – you can’t live them and you can’t live without them.

Last Saturday, we went to Marta and Steve’s place after breakfast to see how they were.

Marta is mad at Aaron because he didn’t phone for updates or come by while Steve was in the hospital. I drive Aaron from work to his car after work so he knew what was happening, as first hand as you can get. While I am not downplaying Steve’s condition, he was in the hospital from Sunday morning to Friday evening. Julie has been hospitalized since January 14 and I don’t believe that Marta has initiated one phone call to find out how she is. Andy even had 2 phone calls with her since Steve got out of hospital and not once did she ask about Julie – Yes, I am very irked – pot calling the kettle black and all that.

Valentine's Evening Update

And so it goes:

After Andy’s eye appointment yesterday, we went to visit Julie for an hour or so. She was in good form at the time. Just as we were living, the resident on the trauma team came by to meet with her.

I got this e-mail later in the day

=======================

From: Julie

Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 2:40 PM

To: Cindy

Subject:

Wanna come brush and braid my clean hair tonight? Ryan is atrocious at it....got my shower and they washed my hair so I'm feeling pretty good.

Saw the trauma team and am getting some more scans done. One of my abdominal area for my liver and then also my pelvis as my left side is pretty tender when they were checking me out. Also Got an answer on how many ribs I broke...5 on the right, 8 on the left. Ribs 2-7 and 2-10 respectively.

==============================

End result of her scans – she also has a non-life/non-mobility threatening fracture in her spine and she has a bruised liver. Apparently her liver was lacerated as well but the lacerations were not deep and they are healing, just slowly.

She is still getting 2 shots a day of heparin, an anti-blood-clotting drug. She says it hurts horribly for about 5 minutes after each shot.

I did get in and brushed and braided her hair so she felt a bit better. I also got her some fancy pink fuzzy socks with the non-slip spots so she can wear them around the hospital and not take a chance on slipping.

I talked to her again late this afternoon – we knew that Aaron and Maria were going to visit so we didn’t want her to be too tired or overwhelmed. And, I have been home all day just feeling under the weather – I think my last month is catching up with me – gee, I wonder why!

She is not eating well or drinking enough water. She still finds it difficult to get up and around. She says she isn’t really hungry and nothing has really appealed to her. I strongly suspect there is an element of depression there right now.

Her roommate is a man probably in his mid-sixties who is dying of stomach cancer which she finds hard to listen to. She says she is more aware of being injured here than she was in India. There she was in a private room and there just wasn’t the same hustling and bustling there that there is at Foothills.

She met with various and assorted doctors again today and, I believe, the occupational and physiotherapists. They are now suggesting the possibility that she might have to go to a rehab unit until she is more mobile. Their house is a 1½ story with the only bathroom on the main floor. Ryan won’t be at home during the day and she is not able to take good care of herself just yet. Needless to say, she is more than slightly discouraged. 

 Maybe she will get better news for Valentine’s Day.

You can choose your friends but not your relatives

We visited with Marta, Steve and Lisa yesterday. Steve was discharged on Friday afternoon from the hospital.

After Steve’s stroke last Sunday, Marta didn’t want Lisa told but she broke down and let her know on Monday so Lisa headed home immediately and got here on Tuesday afternoon. She is heading back to school in Cambridge tomorrow then she is off to Prague on Thursday for a weekend trip with a friend from school.

Steve had a heart attack about 15 months ago. At the time he said it was a minor attack and that he was fine. Even at Christmas, while we had a houseful of strong young men, he insisted on taking the turkey from the oven – even though he had been told to not lift heavy stuff etc.

Lisa managed to talk to the doctors and told Andy what the truth is rather than the "translated by Marta" version.

We thought he was getting better after his stroke but from Lisa said, he still has bleeding in his brain. I believe he will be doing some speech therapy starting in a few weeks.

Anyway, apparently the doctors have said that if Steve has another heart attack or stroke, he will not survive it. He is currently working with a heart that only has 10% usage.

He is planning to continue on his life in his usual fashion. He was off to a cribbage tournament yesterday afternoon. We think that means he will be smoking again but there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Marta had a heart attack last August and had a stent put in. In December she ended up in hospital again because the stent had become blocked so it had to be replaced with a medicated stent. I really hope this one works and stays clear forever. She is rather paranoid about her health these days, but I can understand why. 

At this point in time, I am the healthiest of the bunch.

Sunday in Calgary is a great thing!

We got to visit Julie for a little while this morning. She is doing really well and might be discharged by Tuesday.

The doctors are really pleased that she doesn't appear to have any infections so that is terrific. According to her x-rays, one of the reasons she was having so much chest pain from her last chest tube is that it had moved from being in her lung to being imbedded in her chest wall muscles. The doctors here clamped it off and she thinks the weight of the clamp pulled at it enough so that this morning she found it had in her bed. She asked the doctors yesterday how many broken ribs she has but even they aren't sure. Some of them are very clearly broken but the pneumonia in her lungs makes her original e-rays cloudy so they weren't sure. After the x-rays she has had at Foothills, she might have a more accurate count. 

She has lost some weight but she wanted to so that is not a bad thing. Unfortunately she thinks that she lost is muscle - which is not what she wanted to lose!

She has been moved from Indian meds to Canadian meds and from Indian food to Canadian food - she said she was really excited to have oatmeal for breakfast this morning. 

Her doctor was East West Rescue apparently was not as much help as she would have liked. At Heathrow she asked him to get her something with protein to eat - he brought her chips and coke and kept offering them to her. Apparently for the trip in his carry-on luggage along with everything else he had packed a pair of surgical scissors/clamp as well as a scalpel - not sure why the scalpel - but anyway he had to check his bag because security wouldn't let him on the plane with them. That meant an extra delay in Calgary while he waited for his luggage.

She said the plane from Delhi to Heathrow was really nice with comfortable reclining well-padded seats and was a good experience - at at least as good as you can have with a bunch of broken ribs. The plane was Heathrow to Calgary was an older one and just not as well padded. Also, Julie didn't have an IV so the only pain killers the doctor was willing to give her was Tylenol which is not quite as effective as morphine!

Ryan met her at the hospital because she was processed from the plane through Immigration & Customs into the ambulance so he couldn't get to see her. She really does need to update her name on EVERYTHING - her passport, the hospital and Alberta Health Care have her as Julie B but other stuff has her as Julie W so Ryan was waiting for a W to arrive at the hospital but she was arriving as a B - they did finally get it sorted out but this will be her next project. 

Anyway, she is home and safe and sound - she will heal and be back to creating havoc for all those who care for her. 

She's HOME

Julie arrived yesterday afternoon. We haven't had a chance to see her yet but will today!

National Geographic LIVE

Last night we went to National Geographic Live – what a fantastic show.  They are doing the series in the States and in Calgary and Toronto. We had tickets for all the performances last year and really enjoyed them so I bought season's tickets again this year as soon as they went on sale.

http://events.nationalgeographic.com/events/

Bob Ballard was the presenter and the stories he told of his underwater adventures were great.

He talked about discovering the actual Titanic and how he wasn’t supposed to. He said that now that the Navy had declassified some information he could talk. He was sent to look for some submarines that had been lost and that had nuclear warheads on them. Because that was a secret mission, their cover story was they were looking for the Titanic. Because the crew had a few extra days during the mission, they decided to actually look for the Titanic and darned if they didn’t find it. He said that if Canada extends our territorial water limits, the Titanic will be on Canada’s property and he truly hopes we leave it alone. He talked about how the bodies and clothing would have disintegrated but there are all sorts of shoes on the ocean bottom from the poor souls who died and sank. It just seemed so sad to me to think of all these shoes lying there.