The Words That Sent My Imagination Running Wild

I was afraid to explore what they really meant

The accident

I was nursing an unknown virus at home for the ninth day. My husband had left about 3 p.m. to take some letters to the post office and then swim at the gym. He was dressed for swimming.

As dusk approached, I thought he should have been home, but he often gets in conversations around the pool, so I wasn’t too concerned. When someone called claiming to be the Paso Robles Police, at first I thought it might be a solicitation. Now I wish that’s all it had been.

Instead, the officer told me my husband had fallen at the post office and had broken his neck. I was numb. I had visions of what I’d read in the book Joni by Joni Eareckson Tada, who had broken her neck in a diving accident when she was a teen and was confined to a wheelchair thereafter. It changed her life and the lives of those who loved her, forever.

Thus I was taken aback when the officer continued, “Someone needs to pick him up at the emergency room at Twin Cities Hospital.” I couldn’t reconcile a broken neck with coming right home. I have no experience with home nursing except helping my mother through some compression fractures and her battle with cancer. For the latter, I had lots of help from Hospice.

As it turned out, unlike Joni, Hubby had only cracked a couple of vertebrae. His spinal cord was not injured. We had much to be thankful for. Except for his nose and forehead which required stitches, he was in no pain. He never required pain medication.

I didn’t think I could handle driving him home and getting into the house while I was sick. So I called one of our pastors. He and another man from our church brought Hubby home and into the house for me. They handed me the discharge instructions, and then we were alone. When he came home, he looked like the photo above.

Hubby, the brace, and me

In the photo, that thing covering my husband’s mouth and part of his nose was supposed to be supporting his chin. But our friends who brought Hubby home explained that the ER didn’t have a brace in stock that actually fit my husband. He has almost no neck, and the brace was designed to fit someone with a long neck. For a week and a half that brace made our lives much more difficult than it should have been.

It made it hard for Hubby to eat and drink and take medications. At first, I tried spoon-feeding him through a small slit we could get by trying to adjust the brace down a bit. He drank through a flex straw, so he couldn’t have any hot beverages that might melt the straw.

The top part of the brace was too high, and it rubbed against his ear until it bled. Hubby had to sleep in his mechanical chair, inherited from his dad, which made it easier to get up and down. It also let him lie back to try to sleep. The brace made sleeping in his bed uncomfortable.

It’s fortunate that I’d inherited a walker with wheels from my mom, so Hubby could at least get to the bathroom by himself. But the brace kept him from doing much else without some help. He needed help eating, putting his jacket on and off, taking medications, covering himself with blankets at night, and constantly trying to adjust the brace to make his life easier and less painful.

Getting by with a lot of help from our friends

The accident occurred on a Monday night. Friends from church helped with shopping. Although I had lots of food in the house, we didn’t have some of the other things we hadn’t expected to need. Eleven days after the fall the authorization for the new brace came through. Our church deacons helped transport us again the thirty miles we had to travel to get to the supplier who could properly fit it. I didn’t feel secure enough to handle transporting such a big man between the car and office by myself.

When we got home that day, the world looked much brighter for both of us. Here is Hubby’s new look.

Managing daily life with the new brace

Once Hubby got the new brace, our lives changed dramatically. You can imagine how hard it is to need help with everything you’ve been doing for years by yourself. Hubby is an independent sort. You can imagine how frustrated he was to be dependent on me for almost everything.

For the past few years, we’ve each been grabbing what we want to eat when we are hungry. I see that the food is in the house and that what he likes to eat is prepared to easily heat up. Example: He likes to eat beef patties with whole grains and a green vegetable most days. He also likes to prepare toast spread with avocado and raw garlic slices. I see that what he needs is where he can find it easily. I cook a pound of organic ground beef patties at the beginning of the week and have them in the fridge. He puts it together to eat when he’s ready.

After his fall, in the old brace, he couldn’t even eat that type of food unless I spoon-fed him small bites through slits in the brace. In the new brace, he could once again prepare his own meals. He still had to drink through a straw because he couldn’t tilt his head to drink from a glass or mug. But he felt much more independent again, and that was good for his morale and gave me more time to take care of my own needs.

I can’t say enough good things about the home health care we received from Central Coast Home and Hospice. We had visits from a nurse, a physical therapist, a social worker, and an occupational therapist. They didn’t have to do too much but check vital signs and report anything unusual to the doctor, but they answered many questions for us and helped in some ways that probably weren’t in their job descriptions. For example, one helped us modify the old brace to make it easier to live with until we got the new one.

Mostly these home health visitors helped reassure us and gave this inexperienced caregiver more peace of mind. Two months after the accident we still haven’t met the neurosurgeon in person. We’ve had two video call appointments that lasted less than ten minutes each. It was convenient not to make the thirty-mile trip to see the doctor, but many questions came up as we dealt with the unexpected. It was comforting to see someone almost every day who could offer reassuring advice or advocate for us with the doctor or insurance company when there was a problem.

The visitor who prayed

Although we knew most of our church was praying for my husband, one friend not associated with our church came over to visit and prayed for my husband’s healing. She laid hands on him and prayed three weeks after the accident. She also prayed for his sore knee. The knee pain went away immediately. But short of an X-ray, there was no way to tell what was going on in the neck. It had never hurt. The next scheduled doctor appointment was still two weeks away.

Hubby was ready to ditch the brace right then, but I insisted he wait until the doctor saw the X-ray results. The hospice nurse and therapist said in their experience it normally takes two to six months for the kind of injury my husband had to heal.

Five weeks after the accident we talked to the doctor after he saw the new X-rays. He told us then that the neck was stable. In fact, he compared the X-rays with one taken in 2017. He said he could see no difference between them. Hubby got permission to ditch the brace unless he was in a motor vehicle or walking on uneven ground. The doctor believes it’s important to prevent a new accident as the bones become stronger. He expects to completely release my husband after his next appointment in two months.

Back to normal life

Yesterday Hubby drove to the gym in the next town and had an hour's swim. He’s been a few times in the past two weeks. He went to the dentist today. He no longer uses the walker. And he’s back to his usual eating habits. In the photo, he’s pealing a garlic clove to go with his avocado toast for dinner tonight. And he sleeps in his bed again instead of in the chair. God has been good to us.