Progress

I was eating lunch with some friends the other day and the topic of biology, engineering and water resources managed to come up and it made me realize “oh yeah, I have a job I have to go back to one of these days!” Work is very important to me but I have spent so much time at physical therapy and the doctor’s offices that recovering from this ridiculous incident has occupied much more of my thoughts than anything remotely related to pushing water around the State. Two weeks ago I kept myself up at night trying to figure out how I was to manage the simplest of logistics, like physically getting myself to the office, how I was going to fit a shoe on my swollen and hypersensitive right foot and manage to keep wearing it for a 10+ hour day and the thought of staying awake for that long without taking at least one nap…these seem like simple things but I started to freak myself out that I simply was not going to be able to pull this off. (I have lost a full twenty pounds, so wearing slacks or jeans are going to require use of holes in my belt that I haven’t used since high school!) Anyways, things have changed enough in the past two weeks that I am now beginning to feel like I will be able to handle returning to work when the time comes. That time is now officially September 30. Returning to work is going to be a big challenge; luckily I work with some really amazing people, certainly not the type of people you think of when the words “state worker” come up. I am also fortunate that my job is both challenging and interesting. With any luck this combination will help ease the transition back into the working world.

It has been just over two months since I was injured and when I start to feel a little bummed that I missed out on a lot of fun activities this summer, I have to remind myself that exactly two months ago I was laying in the Trauma-Neuro unit at Sutter...after two blood transfusions I was connected to an IV and oxygen, I had two arms in casts, one leg in an ACL, a broken pelvis and a face that was swollen, scraped and heavily bruised. I was in so much pain that the doctors rigged a system so that morphine was injected automatically every 30 minutes and they put a button in my hand that I could push every 10 minutes to inject a little extra—I literally kept myself awake watching a timer they set for me so I could hit that button right on time to ease the pain just a little more. I was pretty out of it, but luckily I had a steady stream of family and friends visiting and the medical staff was pretty amazing. There was one nurse in particular that treated me as if I had been her friend for years—I was always happy to see her come on duty and I was disappointed when Sutter was forced to release me to Kaiser’s Intensive Care Unit. As I understand it now, Trauma is the highest level of care available—Kaiser and many other hospitals are not equipped to deal with this level of care, so they contract out to hospitals like Sutter for trauma care. When you become medically stable enough they downgrade you to ICU. As I was transferred from Trauma to ICU to Orthopedics the level of care and attention was reduced fairly drastically. It’s like driving around in a Bentley, then they downgrade you to the Mercedes and finally to the Dodge Neon. Not surprising, once I got to the Dodge Neon level I wanted out.

I did miss some pretty incredible things this summer—-a boat trip to Canada with family, which has quickly become my favorite thing in the world to do and I also missed a trip to Italy, Greece and Croatia, but those places aren’t going anywhere to my knowledge. A whole lot of positive things have happened since I was released from the hospital—I have lost both casts and that nasty external fixator that held my wrist together, the nerve pain I have been having is subsiding, I weened myself off the two very addictive drugs morphine and dilaudid with no apparent side effects (other than the fact that I see dead people), I am starting to walk again, I have become a homeowner and I have been reminded time and time again how close I came to dying and how lucky I am to be here. I have also been repeatedly reminded that I have some absolutely amazing friends and family. A lot has happened in the past two months and I am happy I made it through all that--if my recovery progresses at the same rate I should be in pretty good shape in the months ahead!