Author: Karen

I have seen patients with big puffy yellow ribbons and didn’t realize until late last week (when Bob told me) that those mean that it is your discharge week.

Bob got his yellow ribbon today. I was so excited to see his coronation.

Bob. Not so much. He is definitely excited to come home, but not as excited about the bow as I am. See his forced smile in the third picture?

I was a bit teary today as I helped him hand out his thank you cards and waited for the Edible Arrangements to arrive for the nurses station and therapy room as a sign of our gratitude for his care.

Come on. I cried as Jeremiah gave me my visitor tag this morning. This has been my life for two months. It’s gonna be a big change and a big adjustment.

And Ken (the chef in the cafeteria) made sure Bob had pulled pork for lunch (and again for dinner). Ken also said he could make it again when we come here for our one month follow up. It was the first thing Bob asked for when he woke up on April 8.

Bob thanks me all the time for not leaving him during this time. What kind of human would I be if that’s what I did?!? I adore him, even though when counting PT exercises today on his fingers, he counted at me with a special finger because I was harassing him about his count. 🙄✋ Pick one.

On his death bed, Steve Jobs said, “The One who loves you will never leave you for another because even if there are 100 reasons to give up he or she will find one reason to hold on.”

I have a mess of reasons to hang on. He drives me crazy. And I love our crazy. Get ready for Bob 2.0.

Pray for us all tomorrow. We have three meetings before discharge and a boat load of goodbyes. Sniff.

BTW. Boy job alert. I fixed the toilet in my hotel room when the plunger chain thinger came off the stopper thinger. I wasn’t waiting for maintenance. And I’m sure those thingers have names.

I’m proud of me. I can do this. We can do this. Thank you to all of our cheerleaders and prayer warriors. Xoxo

It’s been a rough few days in our camp. Emotions are running high and tempers are short. All on my end of course. 😔

Friday was my last day of school for this year. My kids finish this Thursday the 21, but I have to take the last days off to finish my training, prep the house, and supervise Bob. He will need 24/7 supervision for a period of time after his discharge. I was a bit emotional as I left the building on Friday. I’ve never left before the last day and it hit me kinda hard. Some people have said, “Aren’t you excited to get your summer started before everyone else here?” And my response is, “You DO know why I’m leaving four days early, right? I’ll trade you.”

Mikey, Tiny baby, and I spent some time Friday evening with Lisa and crammed a ton of summer fun in a few short hours.

Miss Lisa treated Mikey to ice cream from the truck. We don’t ever hear that music where we live.

Spider-Man ice cream (which was more like sherbert, so I shared). It was hot and melting quickly and he didn’t complain at the big bites I took from it.

He was a sticky red mess and loved every minute of it. We learned how to play freeze dance. And ate goldfish. And played on the swing set. And did cartwheels in the grass. And blew bubbles. It was a great night to play outside. And he needed that normal kid fun. And so did I. And just so you don’t think he is this perfect little angel, he completely melted down when it was time to go and made a wealth of bad choices. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave Miss Lisa’s either.

On Saturday, Rebecca took Michael to the beach with her so Tiny baby and I could work on packing up the house to move back home and run a few errands. I filled my entire car and STILL have more. I had to borrow three of Joey and Brittany’s suitcases on top of my two and our clothes are not all out of the house.

He had a blast by the way. I don’t even think he ate that much sand.

And he was exhausted.

And then arrested for having an open container. Just kidding…

And this morning, I took the boys to Magee to see Bob for Father’s Day. Father’s Day is really tough for Bob this year because he doesn’t feel like much of a dad right now because he isn’t home. He desperately wanted to be home by Father’s Day and we told him discharge would be around this date. It’s also always hard because Bob’s father passed away when he was a teenager.

We brought him presents (he was emotional opening them) and went to recreation therapy with him. It was rough because the boys really couldn’t participate with him in this therapy because he was doing computer tasks so it really felt like we were home living our lives before the accident. Bob on the computer working and the kids and I just living around him sometimes feeling like we are in the way and a distraction.

Don’t get me wrong, Bob is an excellent dad and an amazing provider, but he can get hyper focused on a task and helping clients out of an urgent jam is one of those things. Imagine you are running a school or business and your internet goes down, or you can’t log on to an important system, or a server that has your most critical files isn’t responding. You would want your IT department on that IMMEDIATELY. And Bob is that guy to a host of clients. So today was rough. I don’t think I realized that it felt like home until I am typing this now.

I’m just tired. And anxious. And overworked. And overwhelmed. While Bob is excited to move home and we are too, it’s also sad for me. Surf Road has been home to us for three months. I’m truly going to miss it. Anything you need is LITERALLY six minutes away. Restaurants deliver food here. I text Brittany, “We’ll be home in 15 minutes”. She asks me often, “Will you be home tonight for dinner?” I know where things are. We have a well choreographed dance in the morning when all five of us are getting ready to leave the house. Tomorrow morning is the last one of those. Tonight is my last “sleep” here.

I will miss this “home”. Brittany and Joey’s home. Our home. They have helped me so much and helped to raise my kiddos over the last three months. Brittany’s fancy hobby lobby chalk board calendar still has all the March dates on it. I feel as if everything in all of our lives stopped three months ago. It’s all going to start up again soon.

And yes, I have spent a great deal of writing this post bawling my eyes out.

On Tuesday night, my Aunt Kaysi and Uncle Wayne came to visit Bob and I at Magee. They brought cheesesteaks from Jim’s Steaks and spent some time with us on the sixth floor and touring the building. It was a great visit where Bob was chatty and engaging.

He also interrupted with any random thought that popped into his head, but that’s the brain injury.

He has a hard time dividing his attention between listening and talking, so he has difficulty waiting for his “turn” to speak and holding his thought in while listening to others. I need to be a little more understanding of this, but instead, I just get aggravated and shut down. I can only take being interrupted so many times. It’s worse than being in a seventh grade classroom. I am really thinking of one particular student who liked to interject any chance that he got this year. 🙄

On Wednesday, Bob went on his community outing. His PT, Ranit, and recreation therapist, Tracy, went with us.

Bob was able to pick anywhere (within reason) that he wanted to go. He picked Wawa. Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks were also within walking distance. I could have gone for an iced tea. Maybe even a nice jewelry store to pick me out something shiny for all my hard work over the last three months.

Nope. Wawa. A place I can drive to anytime I want. He used his walker the whole way and we didn’t bring the wheelchair as a “just in case”. He didn’t even stop to rest along the way. Bob even requested to walk through a park because he wanted to see how he would do on grass. We have more of that at home than concrete. It was three blocks there and three blocks back. About 0.6 mile round trip. He was standing for about an hour. It was a huge accomplishment.

And we grabbed a bunch of different “healthier” options to try for lunch. All pretty tasty.

He’s getting there…one walking trip at a time.

Bob’s discharge date is set for next Wednesday, June 20 and this is three months to the day of the accident. I feel as if three seasons have gone by even though it really has just been spring that has gone by with Bob not at home.

On the day of the accident, there was ice on the road which caused Bob to lose control of the van. Winter.

A very rainy three months followed where I saw the flowering trees and bushes at my house bloom and fade. Spring.

And now it is starting (is it really?) to get warmer. There have been days where Michael is dripping sweat. But let’s face it, he’s a sweaty boy when it’s 50 degrees out. Summer.

Three months of this year. 25%. One fourth of 2018. It’s seven more “sleeps” till he’s home. Five more sleeps for me at Brittany and Joey’s and two more in a hotel.

And my husband wants to go to the beach on his first day of freedom. The man RARELY wants to go to the beach. He would rather be in a pool. And while I enjoy an ocean breeze, I despise sand. But what my baby wants, my baby gets. I’ll let you know how it goes or if he realizes it’s too exhausting to go. He told me “It’s the first day of summer. We HAVE to go”.

And then after two nights of Bob and I on our own, so that we can get the lay of the land and understand how to maneuver around the house with each other, Michael will come home. We will be a family of three for two days and then tiny baby will come back into the mix.

It’s unbelievably terrifying for me to not have the security of extra people to be there at a moment’s notice to watch the kids for me now that we’re going to be back out the middle of nowhere. It’s alarming to be solely in charge of Bob’s care. I know he’s made incredible progress and will continue to do so while he’s in outpatient but it’s still a little bit scary.

On the flipside of being terrified about this next step, the excitement is almost unbearable. I can’t wait to be home. Make meals at our house. To rock Michael in our rocker and read him a story. To be able to see Michael play with his kitchen set and the drum set he loves so much. To be back in my own bed with my husband. To discover what has been in the “date night” boxes that have kept arriving (a gift for Bob for Valentine’s Day).

I’m also looking forward to a summer that will be very different than any one Bob and I have ever had. He usually works harder in the summer to make up for my income ending. Much of our time will be spent in outpatient therapy between Bob and both boys and about 20 appointments for all of us over the next two months. Because of the teacher schedule, you schedule all of your appointments in the summer.

So more juggling, more spinning plates. But we’re a team. And we can do this.

One thing that has been a constant on my rides back-and-forth from Philly is going over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. I’m not terrified to drive across like some people I know, and I enjoy looking out over the side at the water and ahead of me toward the city. On my left, I watch the ongoing construction of what I believe will be an apartment building. I also enjoyed seeing the Chinese lantern Festival come together in Franklin Park during the last few weeks of April.

We went last week.

I get to see these ongoing changes every time I travel, and I can also see the changes when I go to therapy with Bob once or twice a week. Due to the gaps in the timing of my visits, I see large leaps and gains that he is making in his recovery. I could also see the changes in tiny baby over the past week when he was in the pediatric intensive care unit at Cooper for pneumonia. I wasn’t with tiny baby every second of every day, so he also had big changes over the five days he was there. He chunked up!

I wonder if I’m going to be able to see the same gains and improvements with Bob when I’m with him on a daily basis. Just like I can’t tell that Michael is growing because I see him every day, I KNOW he’s growing because his shoes are getting smaller, the sleeves on his shirts are getting shorter, and his arms reach higher up on my leg when he hugs me.

I am going to miss the ride. It is a tiny bit of peace in an otherwise crazy upside down life that we’re living right now. I’m going to miss seeing the people at Magee day in and day out. Thees individuals have given their lives to take care of others. Not only their patients but the families as well. When they see that I am upset, or overwhelmed by everything going on, Bob’s therapists, nursing staff and other Magee employees go out of their way to try to take some of my burden away. Those people have all made an unbelievable difference in my husband’s recovery and have helped us come together again as a whole family unit. They love Bob, me, Michael, and the tiny baby. Truth be told, especially Michael. It shows in everything they do and say.

So I will miss you my friend, Ben Franklin. But now I will be spending at least a few days a week traveling a lot with a new friend, Walt Whitman. Bob will be doing his outpatient therapy at Magee Riverfront and that’s just over the Walt Whitman bridge. I look forward to this next chapter.

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” Ben Franklin

“Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.” Walt Whitman