...and we’re home …

11/12/2021

Many of you sent emails and notes and we read every single one. Thank you! We loved the photos of where you live and what you are seeing in your world … and Neal, that fish that you caught is BIG!

Len was scheduled to come home today but the surgeon stopped by a day early to remove Len’s head staples. Blessedly, my sister-in-law who is an RN had just arrived for a visit, so I left the room. I’m not a fan of first-person medical procedures unless I’m the person who has to get the thing done. It only took a few minutes and Len said it wasn’t too awful. I’ll take his word for it.

So they sprung him a day early – yesterday morning.

We have been home a day and it is awesome to be here together. For nearly a day Len has barely been cynical or sarcastic about anything. (He has not been paying much attention to the news yet.) Maybe his sanguinity is part of the brain injury? I doubt it. He’s just thankful and so am I that he’s as okay as he is and we go forward.

Which is not to say we are going to be cozily at home. As all of you who have been through big medical stuff already know, you come home on rubber bands because now they want you to come back and back and back again. Already he has appointments to see the cardiologist, the brain surgeon, to get a cat scan, to see the brain monitoring physician who will be in charge of the healing of his brain. We have an appointment to meet with the outpatient physical and occupational therapists; that appointment is to schedule a series of appointments. And more.

Len’s health and recovery have become our hobby farm. There will always be the next thing to do.

When you all said that the caretaker needs to take care of herself, I heard that. I am Len’s ride for the foreseeable future. I think driving him to all these things will be as much social life as I can handle for a while. I’ve put a lot of books on hold at the library and my goal is just this. When waiting where I am not part of the conversation, I am firmly resolved to read books instead of looking at Twitter. That’s my whole goal and you can hold me to it. I will need some narratives to keep my brain from turning into a tornado of Len details.

We are seeing a lot more of our kids. This situation sucks but boy, we have spent more hours together in the past three weeks than we have done since the kids lived at home.

So here we are. Grateful. Overwhelmed. Curious.

Did I say grateful?

...

I think I need to write an article soon on how to get two free boxes of tissues from your local hospital via two emergency surgeries accompanied by two weeks of recovery in two hospitals. We also got a mini bottle of mouthwash and some hand cream.