Healing at home (part 8)
Updated: Aug 24
After a comfortable ride in Rick’s truck, we arrived home around lunchtime on Monday, August 3rd. About thirty minutes before reaching the house, I had texted our neighbours, Kevin and Diane, who had been staying at our place during our absence (see part 3). I didn’t want to message them earlier and risk dampening the celebration they were hosting by making them worry about us. After Rick, they were the first to hear about the accident directly from me, in person. As I recounted the events, especially how Dave had been asking for me during those first hours, tears began streaming down Diane’s face. That may have been the moment I truly grasped the emotional weight of what had happened; until then, adrenaline had kept my feelings at bay.
Our neighbours were extraordinary, as they always are. They repeated over and over that if we needed anything (cooking, cleaning, driving, anything at all) they would be happy to help. I explained that I was relatively unharmed and should be fine. Still, knowing Diane had hosted a big family reunion the previous weekend, I told her I would gladly take any leftovers she had. Our fridge was empty, and I had no desire to go grocery shopping while in pain and covered in bandages. Diane, being Diane, was thrilled to share her delicious food. (She used to be a cook in the Canadian Navy — if you know, you know!)
Thanks to Diane’s food, we didn’t have to leave the house at all that first day. Late in the afternoon, we received a call from the organization responsible for Dave’s wound care. They explained that since it was after hours on a holiday Monday, a nurse would come to our home to change his bandages, but future visits would need to be done at a clinic. Chris, the nurse assigned to Dave that evening, arrived around 8:30 p.m. He was friendly and loved to chat. Dave later joked that Chris was a masochist, because while the nurse at Sunnybrook had taken five careful minutes to remove a bandage, Chris tore through the same type of bandage in under ten seconds. On top of that, Chris swore by the healing power of iodine and made sure to saturate Dave’s wounds with it before applying new dressings. Needless to say, it was a painful experience for Dave.
Chris left us with good news that evening: Dave would receive home care for his bandages. Given how painful moving was, Dave was delighted. His delight evaporated the next day when CBI Health (the home‑care organization) called to say there had been a miscommunication. As long as Dave could walk and someone could drive him, he would need to go to the clinic every three days. So be it.
As for me, I had been discharged with a few supplies and a “good luck.” Changing the bandages on my elbows was tricky, but I managed. I ordered more supplies from Amazon, and a corner of our living room quickly transformed into a mini hospital cabinet. I don’t know whether it was my lack of self‑care training or simply the reality of healing road rash, but every time I changed my bandages, they felt good at first, then started itching like crazy within a couple of hours. So I changed them again, and again… Thankfully, it felt like I had a lifetime supply.
For the first few days, I needed painkillers, but I weaned myself off them fairly quickly, except when my chest acted up. I’m not sure if you remember, but I started having sternum pain in the ER (that’s why I ended up getting a CT scan). Well, that pain is still there. A week after the accident, while my daughters were visiting, I discovered that laughing triggered it. We love playing Scattergories, and imagination runs wild in our clan. We always end up laughing at the absurd answers my daughters come up with (answers that only count if you stretch the rules to their absolute limit). It was hilarious, but we had to stop playing because laughing caused sharp pain in my sternum. Another trigger: hiccups. In both cases, I need acetaminophen to calm the discomfort. Since the CT scan didn’t show anything concerning, I haven’t seen a doctor about it. If the pain persists for more than a month, I’ll bring it up with my family doctor. If I don't laugh, and the hiccups stay at bay, I do not have any kind of pain in that area.
Dave’s first week at home was… painful. He continued taking celecoxib and acetaminophen for inflammation, and saved the morphine for clinic visits when his bandages were changed. At night, when the medication wore off, around 2 a.m., he woke up in pain, and that was it for his sleep. He would get up, take his pills, and carefully settle on the couch. He spent the first week dozing on and off during the day, eating on the couch, and only leaving the house for wound care every three days. His broken ribs didn’t bother him much unless he sneezed, which sent him into excruciating pain expressed through a loud moan. (This is still the case now, three weeks after the accident.)
After that first week, things began to improve. Dave could climb the stairs one foot at a time and move around with limited pain. That said, exactly two weeks after the accident, a large bruise (the length and width of a standard Kleenex box) appeared on his right hip. After the bruise showed up, I hit a pothole while driving him to wound care, and Dave yelled in pain. For the next two days, he felt like his recovery was going backward and said they were the most painful days since returning home. The night of the pothole incident, a large bump (twice the size of a tennis ball) appeared above the bruise. When Dave showed it to his doctor, she worried something might have shifted from the jolt and ordered an X‑ray. If “no news is good news,” then it must not be anything serious, because we haven’t heard anything since.
Link to part 9 9https://www.theleqm.com/post/insurance-the-bike-good-news-part-9
Comments