The Pokeberry Quilt

The Pokeberry Quilt

Saturday, August 22, 2009

AND I THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO BE A LOBSTER

Debbie, aka WoolnSails is a member of my yahoo group, and she emailed me that I needed to pick up a parcel at the post office, it's on the way home between work and home, but I didn't read the email until I was already home thursday, didn't work friday, and she said it shouldn't sit around the post office too long. I kept thinking it's something perishable or worse.

But instead it is the most awesome quilt that members of my group made for Jim and I. I was overwhelmed, cried when I saw such detail of our lives that they put into each block, it will go above Jim's bed.










Saturday, August 15, 2009

Jim

Jim was in another automobile accident on June 25, he had left the doctor's office in Livingston, I was with him at the visit, and he was diagnosed with sleep apnea. I went back to work and he was going home after buying cat food. He feel asleep at the wheel just outside of Livingston, rolling the new to us SUV and being partially ejected out the window. We heard at the clinic there was a serious car accident and in my heart, I knew it was Jim, drove to the site and there he was being loaded into the ambulance after the jaws of life were able to remove him. Many hours in the ER and he was flown by air ambulance to Billings, about 3 hours away while I went home to gather my things and tell his family, it was about midnight. I left the next morning not knowing what to expect when I arrived at the intensive care unit, he was alive, but with a collapsed lung, now with a chest tube, 4 broken ribs, a vertebrae in his neck fractured, collar bone broke and the scapula broke, all on the right side, he could barely breath and of course they knew nothing about his stiff person syndrome, funny, in my mind I knew they wouldn't and had thought to grab that material. I became the nurse from hell, after watching him struggle all day, and was adamant they put him back on his meds that keep him from becoming so rigid so he could breath, they gave him some, the doctor and I decided to make him a DNR and Jim agreed, saying our goodbyes and I left only after they made me and went to a hotel across the street. The next morning, I was there and saw some slight progress in his breathing as he became less rigid and they inserted a pain catheter into his lung so he could breath with the broken ribs. It made such a difference. We spent the next week at the hospital, after meeting his neurologist at her office on the holiday so she could fill his pump and look him over, she is an angel, I took him home on the 4th of July with him on oxygen and everything splinted. I took a month off from work as he slowly healed. The neck brace is off his neck and his neck fracture is stable, he is still on oxygen, and he is dealing with loads of depression, his doctor and I had his driver's license revoked. I went back to work at the end of July and of course it is a constant worry that he gets himself around okay while I'm at work and so there is little time for blogging, stitching and such when I get home. We take a day at a time, some are really, really bad and then we wait for the good days to follow.

Thank you to those who contacted me personally.