Dec 23-24-25, 2006
Tigger was happy to have us home. He followed me around for the rest of the day on the twenty-second, demanding lots of petting. Blackjack was just happy to have someone to yell at when he wanted food.
We looked through the mail that had been sent to us over the past couple weeks. Found some nice fat checks from my mom and Gary’s mom ;-) and some lovely Christmas cards. Debra Talley had done a watercolor of a bundled-up little girl with up-turned face greeting the swirling snow, and the print of it was marvelous.
We called my little sister, and I listened in when Gary talked to her about Day Program and such. He told her they had him doing things he’d never thought he’d be able to do but that he could on account of not only the techniques they showed him but their encouragement. In particular he mentioned getting the wheelchair back upright if he falls over backwards in it (and let’s hope that never actually happens). He told Di that he was stronger in his upper body than he’s ever been before – and I note that he’s certainly got muscles like he never had before!
She must have asked him something like if he ever got depressed, because he said somehow he never did, that he always focused on what they said, that he would, in time, be fully independent. He said that his “support group,” headed by me and including his family and friends, helped in that regard. He noted that lots of people with SCIs do experience depression, that one of the workers at Shepherd had told a group of us that she’d been depressed for two years after her accident.( On Christmas, we talked to my mom, and the topic must have come up again, for he said much the same thing, in particular how grateful he was to my brother Joe for taking time out of his life and coming to work on our home and to the math department people who devoted time to the project, helping Joe out.)
Di asked about his job, and he talked a little about that, saying that it would have been very difficult to return to a nine-to-five job, but that he was fortunate not to have time commitments in that way.
When I was on the phone with her, Di told me a funny-but-not-funny story of how she is supposed to be cat-sitting for a friend and the cat, an “outdoor cat,” has run away. Fortunately, through the humane society the cat has been located – it is staying about two blocks away from Di, being fed by a woman who noticed it hanging around her house. Now all Di had to do is catch it by this coming Wednesday.
We went to Kroger in the afternoon, getting back into our routine – including the stop at the ice cream parlor afterwards. Joe and Dolores had said that for Christmas one thing that we should do as our gift from them was to buy or do something special for ourselves. They suggested Gary get a gallon of ice cream “with his name on it.” I told him we were getting that gallon scoop by scoop. (As their gift to me, I intend to buy myself a copy of the soon-to-appear book on the Remington Steele series.)
One thing that was not routine in the day was that we were going to a Christmas party in the evening – this was Gary’s first outing to someone else’s home. Gary called the Stuckwisch’s to make sure he could get into the house. They told him he could come in through the garage door so as to avoid the sunken living room – because Frances didn’t want him doing wheelies in her house in order to get out of the living room and into the rooms where the food was ;-). The garage door led into the kitchen – where the rice and beans and chili would be kept – so Gary didn’t mind that at all, since he tends to gravitate to the kitchen at parties, he says. Through the kitchen he could also get into the dining room, and on the dining table there was a big spread of food as well. This was just fine with Gary. We stayed a couple of hours – probably a lifetime record for me ;-) (parties make me anxious) – and then we left so Gary could start his evening routine. The only “problems” we ran into was that in getting to the Stuckwisch’s we couldn’t see the names on the posts they use as street signs down here, and I had to keep on getting out of the car to see if the cross street was the one I wanted to turn on; also, at their house the outside was very dark which made it harder for me to put Gary’s wheelchair together – but since I’ve done it often enough, I could essentially do it by feel.
Sunday I spent much of the time catching up the blog. I also composed a Christmas letter for Gary. On Christmas morning we started off the holiday by reading each other’s cards and crying over them. We are sentimental saps ;-). Then it was present time! Joe and Dolores had made a donation to the Christopher Reeve Foundation in our names, and they bought us “Superman” and “Superwoman” tags to wear and said they bought some for themselves too. We had made a donation to Toys for Tots in their names. Janet and John sent us a four-foot LED Fiber Optic hanging Christmas tree so we would have some Christmasy decoration. Since it was morning, we couldn’t get the effect, but in the evening we turned the lights out and plugged in the tree and were treated to quite a show! We gave them gift certificates to amazon.com. And that is what I also gave my little sister Di and her two boys. From Di I got some mystery books and Gary got the book “The Last Three Minutes,” conjectures about the ultimate fate of the universe, and I also got some loungewear. For some strange reason ;-) Gary’s side of the family decided Christmas was about kids, and so it was our nephews an nieces that made out with the goods, though Bob did send Gary a St. Louis Cardinals World Series Champions T-shirt. Oddly, I forgot to give Gary the presents that had already come in the mail, only remembering to do so in the evening. I joked that I was getting him a rickshaw weight machine too, but he didn’t seem to think that was very funny.
We made calls to or received calls from the various family members, though we didn’t get in contact with Joe and Dolores until Tuesday morning. My mom, as usual ;-), has been keeping busy going to party after party. Joe and Dolores are coping with 23" of snow in a town in Colorado that, as may surprise you, is not prepared to deal with that amount of snow – the main streets are plowed, but not the others. Usually the snow there doesn’t stay very long, sublimated from solid to gas by the dry air and the intense sun they get there in the winter time. Joe and Dolores sent us pictures of the results of the blizzard. Their dogs seem shorter than the drifts, though Joe says they get along all right by leaping from footprint to footprint.
Gary and I had fun making our typical holiday meal – yes, nearly identical to the Thanksgiving meal I described. I think the only differences were the type of bread used in the stuffing, the fact that asparagus was had instead of broccoli, and that I added cranberry juice to the maple syrup that was poured over the sweet potatoes. The juice we had on hand because we are going to incorporate that in Gary’s diet as a preventative for UTIs.
Gary had intended on Christmas morning to try out the raised toilet seat, which evidently is the correct name for what I had been terming “the commode chair” (evidently a commode chair is a different piece of equipment, similar to a shower wheelchair, and in fact can double as a shower chair). I told Gary “raised toilet seat” just sounds like some man forgot to put the toilet seat down, and he said he was sorry but that was the official name for it. At any rate, the chair turned out to be much higher and much smaller than the one Gary had used at Shepherd, and neither of us were comfortable with him making such a high transfer onto something he would essentially have nothing to hang onto, not to mention leaning over sideways on it and being half a foot higher from the floor than what he’d practiced on. So, we skipped that. Gary called the company on Tuesday and it turns out he got an old model, so he is trying to get our vendor to replace it with the new model. Dealing with vendors tends to be a little like pulling teeth, we’ve found.
So, now I’ve pretty much caught up on our doings, except in the next entry I want to make a bit of a summary of Gary’s achievements at Day Program and what we are incorporating of what we learned.
Tigger was happy to have us home. He followed me around for the rest of the day on the twenty-second, demanding lots of petting. Blackjack was just happy to have someone to yell at when he wanted food.
We looked through the mail that had been sent to us over the past couple weeks. Found some nice fat checks from my mom and Gary’s mom ;-) and some lovely Christmas cards. Debra Talley had done a watercolor of a bundled-up little girl with up-turned face greeting the swirling snow, and the print of it was marvelous.
We called my little sister, and I listened in when Gary talked to her about Day Program and such. He told her they had him doing things he’d never thought he’d be able to do but that he could on account of not only the techniques they showed him but their encouragement. In particular he mentioned getting the wheelchair back upright if he falls over backwards in it (and let’s hope that never actually happens). He told Di that he was stronger in his upper body than he’s ever been before – and I note that he’s certainly got muscles like he never had before!
She must have asked him something like if he ever got depressed, because he said somehow he never did, that he always focused on what they said, that he would, in time, be fully independent. He said that his “support group,” headed by me and including his family and friends, helped in that regard. He noted that lots of people with SCIs do experience depression, that one of the workers at Shepherd had told a group of us that she’d been depressed for two years after her accident.( On Christmas, we talked to my mom, and the topic must have come up again, for he said much the same thing, in particular how grateful he was to my brother Joe for taking time out of his life and coming to work on our home and to the math department people who devoted time to the project, helping Joe out.)
Di asked about his job, and he talked a little about that, saying that it would have been very difficult to return to a nine-to-five job, but that he was fortunate not to have time commitments in that way.
When I was on the phone with her, Di told me a funny-but-not-funny story of how she is supposed to be cat-sitting for a friend and the cat, an “outdoor cat,” has run away. Fortunately, through the humane society the cat has been located – it is staying about two blocks away from Di, being fed by a woman who noticed it hanging around her house. Now all Di had to do is catch it by this coming Wednesday.
We went to Kroger in the afternoon, getting back into our routine – including the stop at the ice cream parlor afterwards. Joe and Dolores had said that for Christmas one thing that we should do as our gift from them was to buy or do something special for ourselves. They suggested Gary get a gallon of ice cream “with his name on it.” I told him we were getting that gallon scoop by scoop. (As their gift to me, I intend to buy myself a copy of the soon-to-appear book on the Remington Steele series.)
One thing that was not routine in the day was that we were going to a Christmas party in the evening – this was Gary’s first outing to someone else’s home. Gary called the Stuckwisch’s to make sure he could get into the house. They told him he could come in through the garage door so as to avoid the sunken living room – because Frances didn’t want him doing wheelies in her house in order to get out of the living room and into the rooms where the food was ;-). The garage door led into the kitchen – where the rice and beans and chili would be kept – so Gary didn’t mind that at all, since he tends to gravitate to the kitchen at parties, he says. Through the kitchen he could also get into the dining room, and on the dining table there was a big spread of food as well. This was just fine with Gary. We stayed a couple of hours – probably a lifetime record for me ;-) (parties make me anxious) – and then we left so Gary could start his evening routine. The only “problems” we ran into was that in getting to the Stuckwisch’s we couldn’t see the names on the posts they use as street signs down here, and I had to keep on getting out of the car to see if the cross street was the one I wanted to turn on; also, at their house the outside was very dark which made it harder for me to put Gary’s wheelchair together – but since I’ve done it often enough, I could essentially do it by feel.
Sunday I spent much of the time catching up the blog. I also composed a Christmas letter for Gary. On Christmas morning we started off the holiday by reading each other’s cards and crying over them. We are sentimental saps ;-). Then it was present time! Joe and Dolores had made a donation to the Christopher Reeve Foundation in our names, and they bought us “Superman” and “Superwoman” tags to wear and said they bought some for themselves too. We had made a donation to Toys for Tots in their names. Janet and John sent us a four-foot LED Fiber Optic hanging Christmas tree so we would have some Christmasy decoration. Since it was morning, we couldn’t get the effect, but in the evening we turned the lights out and plugged in the tree and were treated to quite a show! We gave them gift certificates to amazon.com. And that is what I also gave my little sister Di and her two boys. From Di I got some mystery books and Gary got the book “The Last Three Minutes,” conjectures about the ultimate fate of the universe, and I also got some loungewear. For some strange reason ;-) Gary’s side of the family decided Christmas was about kids, and so it was our nephews an nieces that made out with the goods, though Bob did send Gary a St. Louis Cardinals World Series Champions T-shirt. Oddly, I forgot to give Gary the presents that had already come in the mail, only remembering to do so in the evening. I joked that I was getting him a rickshaw weight machine too, but he didn’t seem to think that was very funny.
We made calls to or received calls from the various family members, though we didn’t get in contact with Joe and Dolores until Tuesday morning. My mom, as usual ;-), has been keeping busy going to party after party. Joe and Dolores are coping with 23" of snow in a town in Colorado that, as may surprise you, is not prepared to deal with that amount of snow – the main streets are plowed, but not the others. Usually the snow there doesn’t stay very long, sublimated from solid to gas by the dry air and the intense sun they get there in the winter time. Joe and Dolores sent us pictures of the results of the blizzard. Their dogs seem shorter than the drifts, though Joe says they get along all right by leaping from footprint to footprint.
Gary and I had fun making our typical holiday meal – yes, nearly identical to the Thanksgiving meal I described. I think the only differences were the type of bread used in the stuffing, the fact that asparagus was had instead of broccoli, and that I added cranberry juice to the maple syrup that was poured over the sweet potatoes. The juice we had on hand because we are going to incorporate that in Gary’s diet as a preventative for UTIs.
Gary had intended on Christmas morning to try out the raised toilet seat, which evidently is the correct name for what I had been terming “the commode chair” (evidently a commode chair is a different piece of equipment, similar to a shower wheelchair, and in fact can double as a shower chair). I told Gary “raised toilet seat” just sounds like some man forgot to put the toilet seat down, and he said he was sorry but that was the official name for it. At any rate, the chair turned out to be much higher and much smaller than the one Gary had used at Shepherd, and neither of us were comfortable with him making such a high transfer onto something he would essentially have nothing to hang onto, not to mention leaning over sideways on it and being half a foot higher from the floor than what he’d practiced on. So, we skipped that. Gary called the company on Tuesday and it turns out he got an old model, so he is trying to get our vendor to replace it with the new model. Dealing with vendors tends to be a little like pulling teeth, we’ve found.
So, now I’ve pretty much caught up on our doings, except in the next entry I want to make a bit of a summary of Gary’s achievements at Day Program and what we are incorporating of what we learned.
posted by Peg Daniels at 11:30 AM
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