Just some ramblings and musings as a milestone day approaches:
After the hit and run:
I did ten days of death watch at the NICU.
I sat at her hospital bed night and day for two months while she was in the coma.
I stayed every day with her for a year as she lay in a vegetative state in the nursing home, suctioned out and cleaned her trach, turned her, and prayed a lot.
after we brought her home, I put her in and out of bed, fed her feeding tube, then later pureed everything she ate, sat her on the toilet, wiped her behind, her mother changed her diaper and bathed her.
Since she started solid food, I have performed the Heimlich Maneuver approximately 20 times.
I have watched in amazement as she has done, without exception, everything the doctors said she would never do.
I have, in the last two years, been slowly relegated to being essentially only her financial manager and chauffeur.
We have been almost constant companions for nearly six years. And now, come Monday Morning, I am going to take her to the airport and send her to Spring, Texas for two weeks to visit her maternal birth-grandmother. She is only taking the walker to make me feel better. (The wheelchair has long ago been relegated to the basement. She only uses it to walk behind at Blade and at gun shows, at my insistance, so that she will have a place to sit when she tires.) I am sitting here thinking of all those days spent wondering if she would ever be anything other than a vegetable, thinking that the distance she has come is beyond what my wildest hopes have been. She is excited, and I am not even apprehensive, because I know she can handle it.
Since retirement, my last major life goal has been to see her able to live independently before the wife and I are gone. It has gone from a faint hope, to a remote possibility, to a good chance, to the point that I believe she could right now thrive in an assisted living arrangement, and some day she will be on her own.
Thanks, Busse people all, for the tremendous outlet and diversion you have been for me over the last six years. Thanks, Jerry, Jennifer, and Hogs (you know who you are)
who have been incredibly generous and supportive. (Dang, that sounds like I am going away, but I'm not about to give up my spot at the trough.)
Prayer works. God is. And I'm free to go fishing for a few days next week.
After the hit and run:
I did ten days of death watch at the NICU.
I sat at her hospital bed night and day for two months while she was in the coma.
I stayed every day with her for a year as she lay in a vegetative state in the nursing home, suctioned out and cleaned her trach, turned her, and prayed a lot.
after we brought her home, I put her in and out of bed, fed her feeding tube, then later pureed everything she ate, sat her on the toilet, wiped her behind, her mother changed her diaper and bathed her.
Since she started solid food, I have performed the Heimlich Maneuver approximately 20 times.
I have watched in amazement as she has done, without exception, everything the doctors said she would never do.
I have, in the last two years, been slowly relegated to being essentially only her financial manager and chauffeur.
We have been almost constant companions for nearly six years. And now, come Monday Morning, I am going to take her to the airport and send her to Spring, Texas for two weeks to visit her maternal birth-grandmother. She is only taking the walker to make me feel better. (The wheelchair has long ago been relegated to the basement. She only uses it to walk behind at Blade and at gun shows, at my insistance, so that she will have a place to sit when she tires.) I am sitting here thinking of all those days spent wondering if she would ever be anything other than a vegetable, thinking that the distance she has come is beyond what my wildest hopes have been. She is excited, and I am not even apprehensive, because I know she can handle it.
Since retirement, my last major life goal has been to see her able to live independently before the wife and I are gone. It has gone from a faint hope, to a remote possibility, to a good chance, to the point that I believe she could right now thrive in an assisted living arrangement, and some day she will be on her own.
Thanks, Busse people all, for the tremendous outlet and diversion you have been for me over the last six years. Thanks, Jerry, Jennifer, and Hogs (you know who you are)
who have been incredibly generous and supportive. (Dang, that sounds like I am going away, but I'm not about to give up my spot at the trough.)
Prayer works. God is. And I'm free to go fishing for a few days next week.
:thumbup:
