In Which Jer Has Now Switched To Wireless

I spent a good portion of the day driving around thinking about the house. I think the news still hasn't quite sunk in-- I'm kind of in a state of shock. There are some pretty amazing people our there, aren't there?

I had a lot of time to think about it because I spent the first half of the day in the car. Jeremy had an appointment at 10:00 up in Seattle. So this morning I got up, wheeled everyone into the car, and drove to Connor's school, where I dropped Connor off. Then I turned around and drove up to the hospital in Seattle to drop Jeremy off. I then turned around and drove back to the school, arriving just a couple of minutes late to pick Connor up. I promptly turned back around and drove back up to the hospital to pick up Jeremy, turned around one final time, and drove home, where we all collapsed in varying states of exhaustion.

I am so thankful that we have that van. We're sure putting it through its paces!

At his appointment, Jer had a lot of new x-rays taken to see how he's healing up. That's his left heel viewed from behind there in the picture; it looks like they put half the hardware store in there, doesn't it? After the x-rays were done, they pulled out all of the remaining wires that were protruding from his feet. Those are the two skinny L-shaped wires on the right in this picture. Everything else stays in there. I am sad to say that this was not anything like the pain-free pulling of the navicular wire that occurred the other day. These were apparently extremely unpleasant coming out.

But at least they are now gone and Jeremy is able to wear his casts a little more comfortably-- they had a tendency to push on the wires. Otherwise not a whole lot has changed. He's still totally confined to the wheelchair, and for the most part is still doing the same exercises that he was doing before. He'll have another doctor's appointment in six weeks, and they'll check how he's progressing then and see if they need to make any changes to his routine. They said everything looked about as expected at this appointment, which is a good thing!

After Connor woke up from his all-too-brief nap, I drove over to the new house to start sorting the trash to go out into the garage. Finds for today included:

-Four old car batteries, one of which was in the office closet.

-A vase in a windowsill with mosquito larva growing in it.

-An entire kitchen drawer full top to bottom with dirty knives.

-One Mikasa china plate buried under a stack of newspapers, two rolls of wallpaper, old dirty rags, and a sack of mouse traps in the bottom of the entryway closet.

I'm putting all of the hazardous things I'm finding-- the old chemicals, bleach, unidentified substances in spray bottles, car batteries, paint thinner, stain, stripper, etc. in one area of the garage (except for the leaking car battery, which gets its own area far, far away from anything flammable), the regular trash in another, the stuff to donate to a charity in a third pile (or fourth if you count the leaking battery as its own pile), and the stuff that will stay in the garage in yet another pile. Hopefully I'll have it finished by this weekend!

After I'd done a couple of hours of good work it was time to call it quits and head home, where I found Jeremy in the middle of a nap in his wheelchair. He moved back into the bedroom to continue his nap and I did a minuscule amount of cleaning (there's only so much cleaning you can do in one day) while waiting for Joanna, our respite care worker/massage therapist, to come over and work on my back, which thanks to yesterday has not been particularly happy today. She always brings the table in and sets it up in our living room-- how's that for awesome?

So it was a very relaxing end to the day, though just after she finished Jer's cheese pizza decided not to agree with him, so there was a mad scramble for a bowl and much unpleasantness followed. I'm hoping that it was just food poisoning and not the start of him getting sick. Not that food poisoning is particularly fun, while it's going on, but at least it tends towards the "short and violent" side of things and not the "long, drawn-out and miserable" end of matters. I guess we'll find out depending on how the night goes.

Tomorrow we're off to a different hospital for more appointments, and then depending on how Jer's feeling it'll be back to the house to work. I can't wait for things to start!

~Jess