Sunday, April 08, 2007

Apr 8, 2007

Happy Easter!

And it was a much better one this year.

Gary’s flap is pretty much back to normal – yea! I was scared about it last weekend (Gary said he’d known it was something to worry about when upon seeing it last Saturday night I’d yelled out, “Jeez O Pete!”) I think the combination of him staying off it earlier in the week and not driving enabled it to gradually heal back up – though it is not quite as good as it was before the trip.

Gary spent time today practicing transfers between his wheelchair and the driver’s seat of the van, without me being present (but both of us with our cell phones on). He has something to prove to the local bus drivers. He told them he wouldn’t need their services after the conference, and they have been saying to him all week, “I thought you were driving on your own starting this week?” But, he didn’t get in as much practice on the transfers as he would have liked, and thus still felt he needed me to be there “for the confidence factor,” that is, he felt more confident in making the transfer if he knew I was standing right there in case he didn’t quite make it over on his own. Yesterday when we went to Kroger I stayed in the front passenger seat rather than standing by him when he made his transfers. Today I stayed in the house, and he practiced the transfers in the van in the garage. He did three successful transfers, and he now feels confident about doing them on his own.

So, tomorrow will be another milestone! He is going drive to school on his own in the late morning, and then return on his own in the late afternoon – the important part being he will make the transfers unsupervised (of course, I will have my cell phone on!). This will also be the first time he has driven on his own, but he has been confident of the driving part for a couple weeks now.

We did have a little problem as a result of his practice today. He decided he should move the wheelchair closer to the passenger seat while making the transfer, so he can catch himself on it if he should fall forward. Well, in moving the chair to this different position, he tugged so hard at it he caused the back of it to go out of whack – it wouldn’t lock into place in the upright position. I couldn’t fix it with him in it, so he had to transfer out of it so I could fool with it. I broke it down (i.e., took off the arm rests and the tip bars and the wheels and the cushion) and then flipped it over and stared at the bottom of it. And stared at it. And stared at it some more. I had no idea why the frame wouldn’t lock upright – I freely admit I am not mechanically minded. All I could see was the left side was locking in fine, but the right side wasn’t down far enough to be in the proper position to lock in at the same time. I was ready to give up pretty much right away (“Let’s call Wlodek!” I said, since I knew he was mechanically minded – he was the one who helped us out with Gary’s wheelchair when he came to visit at Shepherd). Gary seemed reluctant, so we stared at the bottom of the chair some more. I finally noticed the two sides weren’t sloped at the same angle, though the difference was slight. Gary then noticed that there was hole showing around a metal plate under the bolt on the right, but the hole was covered by the plate on the left. So I got out the trusty set of wheelchair Allen wrenches, and loosened the bolt on the right and then moved the frame so the hole was covered by the plate. I tightened the bolt up, put the chair back together again – and then noticed the back of the chair was now sloped too much forward. I had moved the wrong side of the frame. So I had to break the chair down again and adjust both sides in the other direction. I suppose I could have figured this out at the beginning if I were more mechanically minded.

Anyway, after close to an hour I got the chair properly adjusted. Gary crowed, “We did it ourselves!” I wondered what this “we” business was ;-). I *was* a little proud of fixing the chair, I admit, but I also lamented wasting so much time doing it!

Now, if I could only figure out how to do taxes.

Actually, Gary is taking me through that too this year. I would have been a mess (or rather, even more of a mess ;-)) if he had had his accident a bit earlier last year and I would have had to try to figure the tax stuff out on my own.

I talked to my sister Janet today. She told me some about their trip to Australia and New Zealand (she had emailed me lots of pictures!). I told her about how the cats are doing (ever since we returned home from Shepherd last August Blackjack has had a phobia about going in Gary’s room for some reason, though the cat is no longer afraid of the wheelchair – in fact, Gary wishes Blackjack were more afraid of it, since now the cat won’t even bother to move out of the way when Gary is trying to get by him (I can always tell when this is going on, since I hear Gary saying, “Beep, beep!”); Tigger has, as far as I can tell, stopped peeing in undesirable places). Janet in return told me a story about her cat Morrie. Morrie was having terrible allergic reactions to something, which caused him to bite out his fur and scratch himself until he bled, and the vet put him on a rare foods diet! Now, I know about such diets for humans, but I had no idea they did that for cats – in fact, I had no idea cats could be allergic to their cat food. So, anyway, the vet gave Janet the choice of putting Morrie on a diet of rabbit or New Zealand venison or Australian kangaroo! Evidently the venison was the cheapest, and after a few weeks of this, Morrie is all better! Janet has to keep him on this diet, but it didn’t sound like the food was all that more expensive than regular canned cat food.

When I later told Gary about this, I said, “Remember when I tried a rare foods diet?” He said, “How could I forget? It made you really, really sick.” When I had all the gut problems concurrent with the CFS, I was trying to figure out what foods I could eat that wouldn’t cause a reaction, and I came across the theory that it was the foods commonly eaten that caused the problem, so one should first clear oneself of the allergy symptoms by eating only foods one never or seldom ate. While this is a successful approach for many people – and evidently cats – it very much backfired for me. I ate some leafy green we’d gotten at the Atlanta Farmer’s market (maybe cassava leaves? I forget). Pretty soon I felt like I was filled with acid from head to toe. I was so sick! I told Gary to remember what I ate in case he ended up taking me to the emergency room to have my stomach pumped.

Anyway, that little experiment totally backfired and I suffered the ill effects of it for a *long* time. Glad Morrie didn’t have to go through that ;-).

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