Here's what my backyard looked like on April 16, after the great spring blizzard of 2018:
Here's what it looked like a week later:
In between the snowfall and the great melting, a few things happened, some good some bad.
Good: We had BoopityBoop to stay with us twice. After Katie's aborted attempt to go on vacation, a friend invited her to a Mom's overnighter at a local Hotel that may or many not have been attached to a casino where all sorts of fun may or may not have been had.
All I know is the girls really like staying with us! We have twin pack-n-plays set up in the little bedroom and as long as they have their blankies and other sleep requirements met they go down with no fuss and sleep through the night. they both eat like champs and are funny, charming company as long as they're awake. they don't get cranky when they're tired, they get really silly. Boopity is very snuggly and would rather sit on your lap than anywhere else. Boop will sit on your lap because its so easy to reach the things you don't want her to play with from there. Like the remotes. they both know the remotes are powerful magic and they want them. I have a few old ones I let the kids play with but they're too smart: they figure out which ones are useless pretty quickly. They also think everything is a phone, which is funny.
I had a birthday since the last time I posted. Jay and I met our kids and grandkids at a supper club where we all crammed into a booth and tried to eat dinner while playing bingo. It was tons of fun and my walleye sandwich was delicious but we may have tried to do too much at once.
Xena and Babalouie were great: they know how to behave while eating out. Babalouie did insist on sitting on the window sill which was fine until he fell off and bumped his head on the table. He did not cry: he powered through it and resumed his perch on the sill.
Boopity sat in her booster chair like going out for dinner was something she did all the time. Boop acted like a normal toddler: Katie and I spent most of the night trying to keep her from crawling across the table, eating the crayons, opening a dauber, tearing up the bingo cards, choking on potato chips, which she would NOT stop cramming in her mouth, no matter how often she gagged or knocking over everyone's drinks. She's a blast!
Short version: Boopity is tea parties while Boop is mosh pit.
Jay and I stayed over at Ty's house. I was in charge of the kids the following day, as Ty and Megan flew off to the Cayman Islands to spend a long weekend swimming with stingrays.
The snow had already been reduced to not much beyond the giant glaciers in parking lots by then. I had no trouble getting the kids to school on time. My plan was to have a quiet day at the ranch before picking the kids up and having dinner with them. Megan's Mom was coming into town that evening to spend the rest of the weekend with her grandkids.
Life was grand and all was well.
Things turn on a dime.
After I dropped the kids at school, I finally had time to check my email and found that my Dad had suffered a bad fall the night before and was in the hospital.
The good news is that the scan showed no brain trauma: his fall was not caused by a stroke and he suffered no skull fracture when he hit the floor. The bad news: he cracked two vertebrae.
More good news is that his spinal chord was not broken or torn, but badly bruised. This is all very good news!
As the surgeon who cleaned up and stabilized his spine explained to us, the same injury in a young person (teen or young adult), the prognosis would be a full recovery. But Dad is almost 91. It will take a long time for the bruising to heal and no one knows just how far the healing will go in a guy his age.
At that point, I turned to my brother and said "Sounds like the fall would have killed most guys Dad's age."
"Dad would tell you," my brother replied "that most guys his age have been dead for years."
That's true. Dad was cracking jokes right up until they put him under for surgery.
At the moment, he has very limited movement in his extremities (but there is movement! Yay!) and no real use of his hands. Part of his physical therapy right now is to simply stretch out his fingers so that the muscled don't atrophy, which would make movement more difficult as the healing progresses.
Progress will be slow but in the week since he fell, we've already seen some. The bruises on his face and jaw are fading. The bandages on his throat from his surgery have been removed. The swelling in his throat and vocal chords has gone down enough that his voice is stronger. Because of all that swelling, he couldn't swallow for the first few days, which meant no food. A feeding tube is unpleasant but he's stronger for having it. They're taking the tube out and replacing it with a port today so that should make him more comfortable.
Dad's a strong willed, active and involved guy. I don't believe anyone has ever described him as lazy. Even as his physical form has grown old and slowed down, the brain that powers it has not. Being stuck immobile in bed is not to his taste at all! But he has to be patient and let his body heal. If the bruising on his face is any indication, the bruising on his spinal chord is coming along slowly but surely. We don't want to do anything that may set that back, although Dad is gung-ho on getting into therapy. He'll crush it there. If for no other reason because Mom expects him to. He has spent the last 64 years of his life showing off for her, he's not about to stop now. Also, he wants more than anything to get back home and there are things he'll need to be able to do before that happens.
I've only known my Dad for 58 years but in that time I've never once seen him or my Mom fail in something they set their minds to. I have no idea if Dad will walk again. But I won't be surprised if he does. I have no idea if he'll type again but I won't be surprised if he does. We had a family meeting with a representative from acute rehab the other day. Seven of us in the room plus two via FaceTime, listening and asking questions. At one point, Dad looked at me (I happened to be standing closest) and said "no one knows how far I'll be able to heal."
I said "even if you don't walk again, don't worry; we'll get you where you need to go."
He said "I was thinking 'back yard basketball'."
We both laughed.
It's hard to see your Dad laid up. Especially when he's a Dad like mine: he's always been the Captain Kirk* of the USS Enterprise that is our family. He's the guy who knows where we're going and gets us there. As my brother said "you never expect to see Superman hit the ground and not get back up."
But its much harder on Dad. Not only because it hurts so much and physical therapy is going to be like boot camp but because now he has to let us take care of him. That's not what he thought he signed up for. But its where we are and we'll all deal with us because he taught us that.
Back in the summer of '73, my brother Joe was hit by a car** and spent months in traction at General Hospital in downtown Minneapolis which at the time was not a fancy, high end hospital. In fact, it was a dump but they did give the best care in the tri-state area. The place had no air conditioning. We had to bring Joe a little black and white portable tv which got terrible reception. Personal computers and the internet were still available only to the DOD and sci-fi fans. Joe was bored out of his mind. We visited him every day but if we didn't get down there early enough in the morning, he would call home. Caller ID didn't exist back then but we always knew it was Joe: he wouldn't speak, he'd just breathe angrily over the line, every fuming breath more devastating than if he had screamed how could you leave your poor, injured child alone in this terrible place??
I made Dad laugh really hard when I told him he should call Joe every day just to breathe angrily at him. 35 years is some pretty cold revenge.
This turn of events was totally unexpected and it really sucks. But it could have been so much worse!
So while I pray for his healing (along with Woody, who is deep in the valley of chemotherapy) I also thank God for the things that didn't happen. Now we take things one at a time.
We don't always get to choose the path we're on. Can't go over it, can't go around it: gotta go through it.
As they said in Firefly, (yes, I love sci-fi TV):
When you can't run anymore, you crawl and when you can't do that, find someone to carry you.
We'll carry Dad until he can walk this road with us.
* Dad is Kirk but Mom is Spock, Bones and Scotty all wrapped up in an Uhura package. She's perfectly happy to let Dad sit in the big chair and bark orders but everyone knows she's the one who makes it all go.
** Dad wrote about Joe's ordeal in He Wanted to be a Pilot which ran in the January 1990 edition of the Reader's Digest. He left out the part about the phone calls.