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Rehab Diary: Day 20

So. It’s been just a day short of three weeks since I accidentally caught a Sonata in the passenger door. Let’s see how we’re doing.

I need to reach out to the other couple in the accident, and I’ll do that in the near future, but it’s my understanding that they were both out of the hospital almost immediately with airbag-induced injuries to the sternum. That can make daily tasks a hassle (naturally, I’ve cracked my sternum in the past, I remember) but they should be well along the mending path.

My son has done a bit of back-seat driving since the accident, entirely with his mother since I don’t consider myself ready to take him anywhere yet. “There could be snow, Mommy, be careful.” But he’s been to see CMW in the hospital (I’m not using her full name for deflecting-the-search-engine purposes) and he was careful to tell me last night that “The girl who was not talking after the car crash is talking and everything now, Daddy.”

CMW herself is rehabbing at max speed. She’s been at a dedicated facility devoted to rehabilitation for over a week now and her progress has been rapid. She has an “external fixator”, which is a way of saying they drilled stainless-steel rods into her pelvis and attached them to a device that will hold said pelvis in alignment. It makes choosing fun outfits a bit of a hassle, I’m told. She’s still in considerable pain pretty much all the time, but she’s holding up her end. CMW’s like the anti-Lena Dunham or something; despite having a considerable number of actual problems in her life at the moment, she refuses to complain or indulge in self-pity. If I’m not careful she’ll be back to normal before I am, because she works harder at it.

We took the above photo today in a rehab room after having a walker race down the main hall of her hospital. The considerably lighter damage to my pelvis meant that I easily pulled her down the backstretch. I’ve been externally fixed before (one nightmare month in 1988 comes to mind) but I didn’t need it this time.

Your humble author is still using a walker, as you can see, but for short distances (say ten feet or less) I can do without it. It’s been four days since I had any pain medication and I’m working on walking longer distances every day. Since it’s literally zero degrees outside, it’s been a challenge getting around. I’m currently sentenced to a rental Chrysler 200; my insurance company hasn’t bothered to even look at the Town Car yet. Next week I’ll have to square that away.

Overall I’m pleased with our progress in rehab and I have to agree with CMW’s doctor when he says that eighty days from now she (and, perhaps, I) will be in solid condition. We’ve both received support from pretty much every corner, for which I am thoroughly grateful. This period of enforced inactivity has been discomfiting for me; I can’t remember the last time I spent four weeks of my life without boarding a plane. But it won’t last and I’m going to try to get as much possible out of the next month or so. Maybe I’ll get my anthology out, or learn all the modes and scales for the guitar, or finally read the Apocrypha all the way through. Or none of these things.

Thanks for sticking around and reading these random posts. We have a milestone coming up in the next couple of weeks: the 100,000th “click”. I’ll come up with a little contest on the day I think it’s going to happen and I’ll give something completely useless away to a commenter or something like that. Take care — jb

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Categorised as: Housekeeping, What I think