May 18, 2006
Cut off. Alone. I have no internet connection in my apartment! I’m like an addict without ready access to her fix. I haven’t decided yet whether to just make do with using the Shepherd hospital access during library hours, or to spring for Earthlink, or to look into prepaid internet access (anyone done that before and have any advice?).
Anyway, to start bringing you to the present. BCBS came through (with the help of Shepherd’s admission liason Sheryl Hope, who evidently knew how to get to the right people), and Gary was admitted into Shepherd’s acute medical care. When he is ready, he will enter their intensive rehab. Unfortunately his bedsore is quite serious – there is an area that is necrotic (dead) and they don’t know how deep it is yet (he will be examined). It may be that he will have to have surgery to help fix it. If that is the case, that is, the sore is that serious, the guesstimate is that he will need five weeks for the sore to heal after the surgery. And they are projecting that he will need six weeks of rehab. So we are looking to be here from six to eleven weeks. I will let you know when that guesstimate gets refined.
Gary’s doctor is himself a paraplegic, having been that way since he was about twenty (the nurses said he is in his late thirties). I didn’t meet him, but he told Gary that it may be over-optimistic to expect to be able to teach at the start of fall semester. The doctor said that it took him five months before he was able to physically handle returning to school. When Gary told me this, I reminded him that he could still work with his grad students. I later had some additional thoughts on the subject (I wasn’t thinking all that clearly last night, being worn-out from my drive) and I shared them with him this morning. I told him that if he couldn’t teach by then, then he couldn’t teach by then, but first of all, being a teacher was different then being a student – he wouldn’t be running all around campus but would be fairly fixed – and that secondly, I had already been told by either Michel or Jack Brown (sorry, I forget who it was at the moment) that they would get the Disability Office to work with him. Michel also mentioned the possibility of teaching remotely over the web. Anyway, Gary then said that he would still have as his goal teaching at the start of fall semester. We’ll just have to see what happens.
All for now.
Cut off. Alone. I have no internet connection in my apartment! I’m like an addict without ready access to her fix. I haven’t decided yet whether to just make do with using the Shepherd hospital access during library hours, or to spring for Earthlink, or to look into prepaid internet access (anyone done that before and have any advice?).
Anyway, to start bringing you to the present. BCBS came through (with the help of Shepherd’s admission liason Sheryl Hope, who evidently knew how to get to the right people), and Gary was admitted into Shepherd’s acute medical care. When he is ready, he will enter their intensive rehab. Unfortunately his bedsore is quite serious – there is an area that is necrotic (dead) and they don’t know how deep it is yet (he will be examined). It may be that he will have to have surgery to help fix it. If that is the case, that is, the sore is that serious, the guesstimate is that he will need five weeks for the sore to heal after the surgery. And they are projecting that he will need six weeks of rehab. So we are looking to be here from six to eleven weeks. I will let you know when that guesstimate gets refined.
Gary’s doctor is himself a paraplegic, having been that way since he was about twenty (the nurses said he is in his late thirties). I didn’t meet him, but he told Gary that it may be over-optimistic to expect to be able to teach at the start of fall semester. The doctor said that it took him five months before he was able to physically handle returning to school. When Gary told me this, I reminded him that he could still work with his grad students. I later had some additional thoughts on the subject (I wasn’t thinking all that clearly last night, being worn-out from my drive) and I shared them with him this morning. I told him that if he couldn’t teach by then, then he couldn’t teach by then, but first of all, being a teacher was different then being a student – he wouldn’t be running all around campus but would be fairly fixed – and that secondly, I had already been told by either Michel or Jack Brown (sorry, I forget who it was at the moment) that they would get the Disability Office to work with him. Michel also mentioned the possibility of teaching remotely over the web. Anyway, Gary then said that he would still have as his goal teaching at the start of fall semester. We’ll just have to see what happens.
All for now.
posted by Peg Daniels at 11:49 AM
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