Update on MerryK

Sorry it has taken us so long to update the blog. Thank you all for your prayers! MerryK came home from the hospital last week!

After the last post, MerryK was improving slowly but surely. They were talking about letting her go home and then she passed out while sitting up and moving off the bed. She was white as a sheet with blue lips and scared us all! In 30 seconds they had 8 people in her room scurrying around, injecting her with anti-narcotic medicine and running various tests. They concluded she was low on red blood cells (hematocrit was 21) so she received two units of blood the next day. Because she only had one good arm (and it was a pin cushion by this point) the IV for the blood was quite painful and each unit took 3 hours to go in. She was a trooper about it, but Mom was having a hard time watching her suffer.

The next day she was much stronger and talk of letting her go home enlivened all of us! When they did let us go home, the car trip was excruciatingly painful for her as her leg took every bump and jolt. Her arm had a compression bandage on it, that had to be cut off when we got home because her arm had swollen up from all the movement and from not being elevated. But, once we were home, she could sleep without constant interruptions. You cannot imagine the difference just one good night of sleep made on her. She was like a different person. We still woke her up every 3 hours for pain meds, but she could sleep as much as she wanted in 3 hour increments, and she did a lot of sleeping at first!

We have been home over a week now and we are pretty comfortable with our new routines. She still gets pain meds every 3 hours, but she is down to 1 each time instead of 3 and she isn't hallucinating anymore. She is able to move from the bed to the wheelchair very easily now. The most pain she has is from physical therapy, but she is showing improved range of motion nearly every day. She also gets an anti-coagulant shot twice a day and sometimes that is painful depending on where it goes in. She is uncomfortable in bed sometimes because her positions are limited, but she uses pillows to rearrange herself. During the day she sits on the recliner/sofa with her leg up and arm propped.

She can use her laptop (although typing is very difficult) and she watches a lot of old TV shows on DVD, like Stargate SG-1, MacGuiver and Battlestar Galactica, that she has gotten from the library. As a family we are watching Stargate Atlantis in the evening while we eat dinner downstairs with her.

We have an appointment next week to have her heavy splint on her leg removed and replaced with a removable one. We are all curious to see what it looks like under there. She cannot put weight on her arm or leg for another 3-5 weeks. When she was released from the hospital, she did not have a cast on her arm, just a cloth sling. Since there is a metal rod inside the bone (from shoulder to elbow), I assume they don't expect her to injure it in any way! There is also a metal rod in her leg bone from knee to ankle. It is remarkable how differently broken bones are handled nowadays. They had her moving the arm just 2 days after surgery!

Thank you all for your continued prayers for all those bone pieces to heal together properly. Everyone has been so kind to MerryK and she is quite overwhelmed with the attention.

Update on MerryK

MerryK is doing better this evening (Saturday). She is experiencing a little bit less pain and is less groggy. However, she does have a fever (~101 degrees) that is not responding as well to Tylenol as we would like. It may be nothing more than a normal post-operation fever, but it may be more than that. They took some of her blood to culture, so hopefully we'll know more tomorrow. She hasn't eaten much do to a depressed appetite, but hopefully that will change for the better as well.

Thank you so much for your prayers.

Prayer Request

Dear Friends,

In case you haven't already heard, our dear MerryK was hit by a car on Friday (1/11) while she was walking to catch a bus. Her right arm and left leg were badly broken, but thankfully she did not have any head or internal injuries, other than cuts and bruises.

On Friday afternoon, she went into surgery to repair the broken leg (estimated 3 hours). Since she was enduring the surgery well, they decided to repair the broken arm while she was out instead of having to have a separate surgery later. It ended up being ~8 hours, which was one of the longest 8 hours that I have spent waiting for news!

She came out of the surgery OK and is doing as well as can be expected (lots of pain). The doctor said that they put pins in both her arm and her leg and that she wouldn't be able to put any weight on either for about 6 weeks and that she wouldn't be very mobile during that time. Those of you who know MerryK know that being immobile for a day or two is hard, but six weeks?

Please continue pray for her so that she will endure the pain and the immobility with a good attitude. Pray for our family as well as this will be a major disruption for our family.

Thanks,
ClanKeeper & PurringPiggy

Realization

Winter quarter started for me yesterday, and I'm getting to know all my new teachers, classes, and fellow students. Something else happened, though, in my Introduction to Philosophy class. The teacher made a comment while talking about the Greeks that, we probably didn't know, but the movie "300" was based on fact, and I then realized that I was likely one of the few people in that classroom who had wanted to see "300" because it was based on fact.

The good and bad of Encore

We almost never play the game Encore (a game where teams battle over who can remember the most songs with a certain word or subject, and then sing at least six words of the songs) except on New Years Eve, and I always have the same two thoughts about it.

Good: Finally having a use for remembering many, many, too many, lyrics to songs.

Bad: The "Day After" syndrome. In other words, when you listen to recently purchased music and realize that you are an idiot for not remembering the song "Dream a Dream" when the word was "dream", the song "Name" when it was "name", and a very popular songs whose chorus has two of the four seasons you couldn't remember when the category was "Songs With the Four Seasons".