Now that we’ve come out of the day-to-day difficulties relating to that injury, I thought I’d recap some of the lessons and give an update on what has happened in the aftermath.

First, the medical bills are not as catastrophic as we thought they would be.  They never reached the $20,000 mark, stopping just short of $15,000, although there is still one bill we think we’re supposed to get, but since no one is contacting us about it, forgive us if we don’t volunteer to go get it.  We have some negotiating room left as well, and all our sources have indicated that the bargaining will go better if we have cash to pay off whatever the final figure is.  More on that in a sec.

Second, Gabriel is fine.  By “fine”, I mean that he shows no detectable physical effects from the injury.  His skin healed very quickly and he is in no pain.  He does have a hitch in his giddy-up, but you can’t tell that unless you are intently watching him and knew what he could do before.  He jumps on the trampoline, runs about all over, generally behaves like you’d expect a 2-year-old to do.  There will obviously be no lasting physical damage from the experience, and of course he can’t remember it.  For this we are extremely grateful and conscious of the fact that we are blessed.

That said, there are a couple of non-physical remnants of the cast.  Gabriel does not sleep through the night any more.  One day we’re confident he will, but at this point, he still wakes up at least once every night.  We disassembled his crib during the six weeks of the cast, because we couldn’t lift him into it without hurting him, so he sleeps in a bed now, which means he can get out of it at will.  We find him standing next to our bed at many a 2am.  Generally, he goes back down pretty easily, especially for Dad, but we dream of the day he won’t get up at all.

He drank a lot from a bottle when he was in the cast, because of the no spilling and ease of operation, and now he wants a bottle practically every minute of the day.  We can deal, though it’s annoying.  But the worst of it is that he was once potty-trained, and now he isn’t.  At all.  As in, he has no desire, at all, to use the toilet.  No curiosity, no interest.  Nothing.  When he originally did the potty-training, he was very quick to get it, as he has a volume of examples in front of him to imitate and he is a social child.  But now, nothing.  We’re not forcing it – he’s not even three yet – but it does make us occasionally look wistfully back to early February when we didn’t use up five diapers a day.

In all, we gained significantly more than we lost from this, as I tried to indicate in this post.  Our huge number of new and intensified friendships, all by itself, would have made the experience worthwhile, but we learned tremendously ourselves, and we’re still learning and growing and improving.  It has made us more patient as parents, more unified as a family, more aware of others that have and will have similar and greater challenges to overcome.

And there’s one more thing I’d like to bring to your attention, though I feel a little funny doing it.  As I mentioned many times along this journey, we don’t have medical insurance, and paying out $10-15,000 for doctor bills is a bit beyond our resources.  Some good friends have stepped in and put together a fundraiser to see if we can eliminate the debt overhang from this.  It’s on June 4 in Lehi at the Legacy Center (Main and Center), and goes all day.  There will be a garage sale (for which we desperately need more items to sell, those of you that are spring cleaning and getting ready to de-clutter), a bake sale, a silent auction, whole rafts of things (tickets here).  There’s a family dance, a pool party, and I’m not sure what all, but Jill Peterson can tell you if you email her at jillyn_oc_ca@yahoo.com.  We will be absurdly grateful for anything you could do to assist.  All proceeds go to defray medical expenses (and give us negotiating leverage), and if we raise more than we need, all of those additional proceeds will go into a permanent fund for assisting other families in similar difficulties.  We’d like to make lasting good from what was a freaky bit of bad luck, and we hope very much that you’ll be willing to help us.

I’m constantly amazed by the wonder of the little things through this process.  I’ve never had so much fun playing hide-and-seek as I did when Gabriel was stationary and we had to figure out how to do it with pillows.  Watching him eat, watching him learn to roll over with those heavy fiberglass pants on, watching him learn to SLEEP, even, everything was new and great.

And then I think, you know, I have eighth children, and everything they do is new and different and amazing, and I’m missing it.  I’m missing the best parts of my life, because they’re free and they occasionally rub their snot on my shirts.  How ridiculous.

I’d say, “no more!” and “I’ll never do that again!” but I know that’s false, and I will do it again, and those beautiful, incredible little people that inhabit my house will go back to being background noise, but I do hope and pray that again and again I’ll be brought back out of it a little more, to see the miracles that happen to me every single day.

Today is good.  I see it today.  Today I’m alive, and Gabriel’s walking, and the rest of it, really, doesn’t matter one bit.

The night this injury happened six weeks ago, I have a scene in my head from outside the hospital.  I can see myself as if I were watching a  movie, walking across the parking lot of American Fork’s Emergency Room, still dressed in the remnants of my tuxedo from the Twelfth Night Charity Ball, watching the taillights of the ambulance as it carried my wife and little son away from me.  I remember feeling terribly alone, shaken and scared and hopeless.   For the first time in a long, somewhat disappointing night, I was by myself, and I began to weep.

I raised my eyes to Heaven, where dwells a Father I believe in, and I told him, “I don’t understand.  I don’t understand what you’re doing to me.”  We’ve been together, my Father and I, long enough for me not to insult Him by asking “why”, for no such answer is ever going to be forthcoming.  I know better.  Despite my sadness and frustration over this event, I wasn’t so lost as to forget that I was still the most blessed of men.  I wasn’t so far gone that I thought that God somehow owed me an explanation, as if a God omnipotent and all-loving might be making a mistake.  Of course He did not, and does not, and I will trust in Him, though he slay me.  But I wanted to tell Him, although of course He knew, that I didn’t understand.

He has spent the last six weeks helping me get over that.  And though I am not so simple as to believe that I can ever search all the ways of God, find out all His counsels, or ever know all the reasons why He does the things He does, still I can see so many places where His hand has been evident.  This post is my thank-you letter, to a merciful God that loves me better than I love myself.

Because this happened:

• How many friends have I connected and reconnected with?  Nothing brings friends closer than misfortune, and this misfortune was no different.  I can hardly count all the well-wishes we’ve received, all the old and new friends we’ve spoken to and been able to thank for their kindness and consideration of us.  If from this life I can take anything, it is surely not my home or my business, but the friendships and the relationships I made while I was here.  I’ve said before that I know that you CAN “take it with you”.  You just have to convert it to the currency they use where you’re going.  Thank you, all of you, for making me the richest man in town.
• How much more have I been compelled to be humble?  It’s a little tough to have unwarranted confidence when you’re faced with concrete evidence that often, there’s nothing you can do to make things better, or even different.  Sometimes, no matter your business acumen or physical strength or even your money, you just can’t do anything except keep on keepin’ on.  No money could make Gabriel’s leg heal any faster.  Nothing but playing with him and sleeping with him and holding him while he sobbed and screamed could do anything to make things better.  I saw often and clearly that I was powerless before the conditions that I found myself in.
• How much more of my real power have I discovered?  I have never fancied myself a great businessman.  I’m a Bailey – and not Harry Bailey, either.  Peter, more like, or George.  But what I have loved so much about the story of that film is the invisible power George has, a power that improves the lives and the fortunes of hundreds of people in ways that are obscure and even hidden from him.  Despite my feeling of powerlessness in the face of Gabriel’s discomfort, my wife’s weariness, my family’s displacement, the damaging or outright destruction of dreams and plans we had, I discovered to my surprise a different power, far stronger than I supposed, that could still improve things, even if making the problem go away was impossible.  I COULD hold my little son.  I could let my wife sleep in here and there.  I could focus our family on the things I could do.  And I could tell the story of what we were doing, in the hope that someone out there could benefit if he were caught in similar circumstances.
• How much fun have I had being a daddy blogger?  There are a huge number of Mommy blogs out there, and I love to read them, but I occasionally feel that perhaps there ought to be a few more Daddy blogs, because as important as it is for us men to hear how our wives think – I can’t tell you how useful I find that – it’s still nice to sometimes hear the truth about what’s going on in Dad’s head, too.  We tend to sit there like Lincoln on Rushmore and just take it.  At least, we look like we do.  But we hurt, too, and we feel powerless and hopeless and achy and all the same stuff everyone else does.  We just don’t talk much about it.  It’s been educational to use this space to be perfectly candid about our situation from the Dad’s perspective, and I’ve been grateful for those of you Dads out there that have let me know that you appreciate it, too.
• How much have I learned?  Before this, I knew nothing about the medical establishment.  I knew nothing of medical billing, hospital procedures, emergency rooms, medical staff, treatment options and possibilities for rehab.  I had done some vague thinking about insurance and government assistance, but nothing of concreteness.  That’s changed.  I’ve learned about thinking outside the box on daily challenges, being patient in extreme provocation with my youngest child, and how compassionate and creative my other children are because they love their brother.  I’ve been able to re-imagine my life, partly out of necessity, and discovered how incredible things can really be.  I was blind.  In so many ways, now I see.
• How would I have found Jill Peterson?  More than any of these other things, from a business standpoint, the greatest blessing of this ordeal has been the discovery (or re-discovery) of Jill Peterson, who became my executive assistant one week after the accident.  I’ll have more on this later.  She’s far too important a person to get just a paragraph here.  But suffice it to say that had she been the only blessing we received through this, it would have all been worth it. No fooling.
• How ignorant would I have remained about my wife’s incredibility?  We’ve long suspected that Jeanette was really Elastigirl in disguise, but this last six weeks has proved it.  She can go days with only the briefest of rests.  She can maintain her calm at 4am when the screaming child vomits, not because he is sick, but because he’s frustrated.  She can retain her appetite while sitting with a child that smells like the inside of a port-a-potty on a hot summer day.  She can re-arrange her entire life in a day, giving up or postponing huge numbers of things she’d really like to do.  There is nothing she cannot sacrifice.  There is no life she cannot affect for good.  She has been able to use this to grow closer to each of her children, and to me.  She’s the cement that makes the foundation of our family.  No husband could love his wife more than I love her, but then, no husband is as fortunate as I am.  We’re stronger and we’re better, because of this.
• I wouldn’t have remembered.  I blogged about this a long while ago, but it bears repeating here.  It seems that only in the face of disaster do we dare to re-imagine our lives, to let go of what we thought would be, what we are terrified of losing, and like a seed bursting from its pod fling ourselves into the unconstructed future, making of it what we can as the chance comes.  I remember now.

And today, another blessing, as we are reminded of the incredible miracle of just being whole.  To run, to jump, to dance…to touch the smiling face of a loving Father in Heaven, who had a whole treasure chest to give us, if only we would stay with Him as He pushed us into a place we would never have gone ourselves.

I still don’t understand.  But I’ve learned, even more, to trust Him anyway.

There’s no help for it, but aside from the very first week of the injury, when we were getting used to the cast and trying to figure out how to keep it as clean as possible, and dry it, and protect it, this is by far the worst.  Sitting in the bathtub with a little boy screaming “my leg! My leg!” while you try to wash it off and his skin comes off in your hands is pretty much the worst thing I’ve had to do in a while.  Since I had to hold his broken leg in my hands six weeks ago, I think.

Yay for us.

For now, Gabriel seems okay, and this rash on the unexposed parts of him isn’t as bad as it could be.  He’s spasming and seriously unhappy when he moves, but if he sits and watches TV he’s doing okay.  A little at a time, he’ll get back in the swing of things.  Really, it’s not as terrible as I’m making it sound.  I’m just a bit shaken by the gap between my ridiculous expectations and the reality.

We now get to negotiate amounts and payments, which, as you might imagine, we’re not really all that excited about doing.  I have to thank Kevin Probasco and Theron Harmon for their generous offers to do some negotiation on our behalf, and we’ll take them up on that.  We need the help.  Mark Lofgren has also offered to put on a family dance fundraiser to help us get out from under this, and we may couple that with a pool party, so be looking for announcements about that going forward.  We’re very grateful.

As I posted a bit ago on Facebook, we got a check in the mail for $1000.  Cashier’s check, of course, with absolutely no identifying information.  That saved us.  It came on a day when we absolutely had to have a little more money to pay a bill that we could not pay, whatever we skimped on and tried to save.  Whoever you are, if you read this, know that your gift came as a blessing from Heaven, and we implore our Good Father to bless you a thousandfold more than you have blessed us.

The monthly payments the creditors are asking for come to about $550/mo.  At that payment, it would take a bit over two years to pay everything off, even at the exceptionally reasonable interest rates we’ve been offered so far.  It’s a payment we can probably make, but not if I keep the office on Main Street.  That would have to go.  That, or I will have to come up with some hard proof that that office makes me more than the $10k/yr it costs to maintain it.  We don’t get a lot of walk-ins that want to do loans.  Perhaps people drive by and call; I don’t know, but I doubt it.  Perhaps you reading could comment, and help me decide how important that location is.

In considering, some of the things happening at corporate HQ in Bountiful may be of use.  I’ve been hired to be the PR Director up there, which has made a large change in how much time I have to do my job as a loan officer and branch manager.  There is now some serious discussion of my running the corporate branch as well, which would require me to fold my Lehi branch into that from a reporting standpoint.  I have an office there, although it is 40 miles away from home (and commuting every day is NASTY, let me tell you).  So I could continue to be a loan officer without my Main Street office.

Jason is the only one that uses the office every day, though it truly is convenient for many things.  Not having an office down here, to be able to meet clients in, would be a hardship.  Would it be $10,000 a year of hardship?  I don’t know.  But I don’t see any way to cut anything else out of the budget, especially with Alexander putting his mission papers in shortly, with the almost immediate beginning of $400/mo payments for his support (which will continue for six years, as his brothers follow him).  We can’t handle both things without radical changes.

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We’ve given up trying to keep the cast clean now.  We did all we could for weeks, and it was a slow losing battle all the time.  It’s so bad that Gabriel’s socks get pee on them by conduction wherever they come in contact with the cast for any length of time.  But there are only 50 hours to go.

He’s become very mobile.  He crawls around all over the place, scoots himself, even stands up for short periods, though balancing is very complicated, as you might imagine.  He’s happy, he’s not in pain, or even evident discomfort, in spite of it all.  Truly, humans can get used to pretty much anything.

Gabriel has lost a lot of weight.  The original rash that caused us so much trouble was doubly hard to deal with because Gabriel filled his entire cast with no difficulty whatever, which made it very hard for air to circulate and his skin to get better.  It was also difficult for us to get our hands inside the cast to put the cream where it needed to go.  Not anymore.  Gabriel eats very sparingly, and though we ply him with fatty treats – he had pie this morning for breakfast – he’s still markedly thinner than he was.  Some of that will be muscle tone, but a lot of it is that he doesn’t eat much.  We’ve had little success with anything we’ve tried there.

We took him to church today, the first time since the injury.  He wasn’t quiet, but he liked being there.  A couple of people remarked at how thin he was.  We’d be worried, but he’s always been a picky eater, and he’s still got great energy.  There’s only a week left.  He’s not going to starve to death.

He has also discovered mobility again.  He army-crawls across the floor – he loves the tile entryway and kitchen for this – and he rolls over and generally scoots himself around.  Today he also stood up for a bit, which is hard to imagine, with his legs splayed our crablike as they are, but he managed it.  I doubt he’s going to have any trouble with mobility once the cast comes off.  In seven days.  Did I mention that?

He still stinks.  The cast is awful.  But there really isn’t much we can do about it.  We’ve tried all sorts of things, but none of them really work very well.  It’s just something we have to work with and endure.  There have been a lot of those things.

Gabriel is sleeping better.  We have him upstairs now, in his brother’s bed, where he can sleep a bit longer and not get awakened by his siblings getting ready for school.  That’s working.

Something I didn’t mention was that we have been having him wear his 7-year-old brother’s shirts.  Beefers, the aforementioned 7-year-old, seems okay with this.  The larger shirts work better, because they drape down over the open top of the cast, and prevent food and other things from getting down into the cast, where they could cause significant problems.  They’re also easier to get on and off him, which is a bonus for us.

We’re tired.  We’re very ready for this to be done.  But we’ve learned a great deal, and we’re far more sensitive to the problems other parents face, most of which, honestly, are a lot more severe and long-lasting than what we have to deal with.

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The last bill is in, we think.  The ambulance bill came this last week.  It wasn’t as much as we thought it would be.  I’ll line-item the expenses in a post later this week, but suffice it to say that we are incredibly blessed once again.  We’ll have payments of a decent size to make for a long time, it looks like, but we could have been crippled by this and we will not be.  We are not going to be bankrupted.  We can deal.  Your faith and your prayers have worked a miracle here, for which thing I am grateful beyond words.

Boy, do I know that feeling.  But I had an answer.

Steph-

Hmm.  Motivation.  Good question.

There are about a million different theories about how to motivate oneself.  There’s meditation, there’s affirmations (where you say inspiring things to yourself in the mirror), there’s prayer (I’m partial to this one, though I admit it doesn’t always work), and then there’s the only one I subscribe to all the time, as it never fails – just suck it up and do it.

I read a lot of self-help books, looking for answers.  The best one is, of course, the scriptures, but I like biographies of great men and women, and sometimes just inspiring fiction (Card’s books, Dick Francis, lots of others).  I believe that the greatest motivating force in the world is love.  I also believe that ultimately, that is the ONLY durable motivating force in the world, as all things shall fail, but charity (that is, love) never faileth.

But then there’s the problem you’ve already thought of: how do I love writing an essay?  And the answer is, I have no idea.  BUT.  I do know that you love the class.  I know that you love the idea of doing great things, of being the kind of person that your children will admire and emulate, and that a good man will love and cherish.  I know that you love being disciplined, and doing hard things well.  When you’re in your right mind – you know what this means – you love these things.  When it gets hard to write and to read, when you just don’t have any interest in doing what you have accepted the responsibility to do, that is when you have to have faith that when you made the commitment you DID know what you were doing, and that you do want the things you’ll get if you finish.

And then you just sit down (or stand up, whatever) and do what you have to do.  There is no job, no task, no activity, that you’re always going to want to do.  Nothing.  I swear to you, there is never going to be anything that you don’t loathe at some point.  But adults, real adults, they do those things even when they can’t stand to do them.  It’s what gets Mom up in the middle of the night to clean up puke.  It’s what takes Dad out the door in a snowstorm to go to work.  It’s what makes me grade essays when I have three clients calling me wanting status updates on their loans.  It’s what makes me call those clients back at 8pm, because I’m still at the office because I was grading essays.

I have a quote above my desk (I have several, but this one is pertinent). It says “suck it up and call”.  That’s what I do.  I call people.  I hate it.  But that’s what I do because I love the things I get if I do it.  Some days, it’s close.  Heck, some days, the hate wins.  But not every day.  Not most days.  More and more, it’s ME that wins, the real me, that knows how to shoulder responsibility and loves the strain of hard work.  This will be true for you, I promise you.

Just keep going.  Grit your teeth, and move.

You can do it.

Mr. C

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Apropos of this, I’ve written before on how silly – and at points destructive – the modern psychobabble is about “following your Muse” and “doing what you love”.  Don’t misunderstand.  As a man with an active Muse himself, I listen to those whisperings a lot, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  But there are days when the Muse tells me to write my novel, and I don’t get to do that, because I made other promises.  It’s hard, but that’s part of being an adult.  My Muse is fascinating and romantic, but she isn’t smart, and she’s definitely not wise.

Old-fashioned virtues, no doubt.  But critically important ones.  All of modern society points us at the carefree and romantic as the only ways to really “live”.  Fortunately, there are enough people left in the world that can see that is nonsense that some things still get done.  There are those that don’t cheat on their spouses, even when the Muse is telling them how hot their secretary is.  There are those that shoulder a pack and a rifle and slog through the mud to get shot at.  Thank a Merciful God.

I don’t believe that I was put here to find what I love to do and do it.  I think I was put here to find what I should do and learn to love doing that.

I love poetry.  But it is prose that makes the world go ’round.

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Gabriel’s rash is mostly better, but now he has fascinating blisters down the front of his cast that we can’t see any cause for.  The cast is wet, though we dry it as best we can (it doesn’t get dried much when I work late, which I’m having to do more and more often now), so I’m sure that has something to do with it, but what can we do about it?

Still no bill from the ambulance.  Is it mentally unstable of me to hope that they’ll forget?

There’s discussion by some people of having a family dance/fundraiser to defray some of the Gabriel expenses.  Is that something that would be of interest?  Who would come to that?

Next post is the long-promised “why I don’t believe in Medicare” one.

We’ve gotten into a basic holding pattern now.  The rash is under control but not eliminated.  It doesn’t appear to hurt him.  I’ll have Jeanette do a guest post on her experiences with various diaper-rash creams, but whatever she’s doing, it’s been successful.

The cast is damp, but not soaking.  We’ve used a cool/warm hairdryer to dry off the cast and get some airflow going, and though Gabriel hates it when Jeanette does it, he’ll put up with it, and he doesn’t seem to mind it when I do it.  Big problem there is that the noise of it wipes out most conversation in the local area.  But we can deal for half an hour a day.

And the big news is that the bills are continuing to roll in.  We have a decent estimate now of the totality of the damage, and it’s going to be heavy, but not crippling.  We will probably be a bit over $10,000 total gross bill, though we’ll see when the ambulance bill arrives.  We got the massive $5500 whack from Primary Children’s the other day, and Jeanette has still not gotten over the line-by-line insanity of that.  More detail coming in a subsequent post.

The bottom line is that while we won’t be able to pay it all off in one chunk, we will probably be able to allocate funds to pay it every month, depending on how those negotiations go.  Several of you have offered your skills in this area, and we are hugely grateful for this and will certainly accept your offer, once we have everything in hand.

Gabriel isn’t sleeping great – last night he did his usual 2 hour fit, which our home-for-Spring-Break son eventually terminated, God bless him – but he’s sleeping fairly well, so we can, again, deal with it.  He goes down better for me than for Jeanette, which is a great thing for her.

He’s also getting outside now that the weather is okay.  We took our weekly family walk Sunday and Gabriel went with us in the stroller.  We’ve tried wagons, big strollers, all sorts of things, and he likes the tiny little umbrella stroller best.  No idea why.  It isn’t sensible, but there you go.  He loves being outside.  We can also wrestle with him some now, which he likes, and even hang him upside down by the bar between his legs, which I’ll have to get a photo of.

Note: the hospital staff told us not to lift him by the bar.  Then they told us they had to tell us that, and that since you couldn’t get the bar off with a chainsaw, we might as well go ahead.  If anything happens to Gabriel, it is not their fault.

Dozens of you have told us you’re praying for us and sending peace and patience our way.  It’s being received.  You all have some serious Karma built up.  We love you and can’t possibly describe to you how wonderful it feels to be the recipients of so much goodwill and love.  What wonderful friends you are.  How amazed we are by every one of you.

Gabriel is not a sedentary child.  He runs around everywhere, like a lot of two-year-olds.  Sitting still is hard for him, but he’ll do it – fortunately he likes TV, especially basketball and kids shows on KBYU.  Apropos of this, in the hope that it will be of benefit to other parents, here are some short reviews of a few of the possibilities:

Word Girl: Cute show, animated in that style that you see so much of these days, where people use computers that could launch the Space Shuttle to make animation that looks like it was created by a 4-year-old.  It’s not heavy on words, despite the title.  Reminded me a lot of Power Puff Girls, and I don’t mean that in a good way.  We use this one to put Gabriel to sleep on hard days.

Word World: Gabriel’s favorite.  I like this one entirely because of that.  It IS clever.  Everything in the world is made up of words, and the main characters, a sheep, a duck, and a pig, with assorted hangers-on like bear and ant, go around having adventures and fixing things by changing letters around.  I find it unwatchable, myself, but as I say, this is the favorite.  Episodes available on Netflix streamed over the web.  Thank goodness.

Super Why: I don’t even know what to say about this show.  Part of me appreciates the cleverness of the concept, taking little animated kids (this show’s animation is actually quite professional 3-D) and turning them into the Super Readers, so they can go solve problems by learning to read.  Part of me thinks the show is the single most annoying thing I’ve ever seen, because it’s one of those incredibly patronizing shows that asks your kid to “interact” with the kids on the screen, where they pause, ask you to say your name, look at you and ask you questions, all that.  But I hear my four-year-old talking to the TV and naming off letters and reading words along with the show.  That’s not nothing, as my favorite TV character once said.  Watch out for the jingles (of which there are several hundred).  They will get stuck in your head.  This is not something to wish for.

The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot about That: I’m confessing.  I love this show.  Most Seussian knockoffs (this is even worse for Milne/Pooh knockoffs, which are universally awful in almost every respect) don’t work because the writers aren’t capable of being even half as clever as Geisel was, but they imitate the style, and that gives me a rash, sort of like Vanilla Ice rapping.  But this one does it the other way around, going for clever first and style second.  It doesn’t try to rhyme all the time  – face it, Geisel was a master at this, and there are few to match him – but it preserves the whimsical style without attempting to make the show as if Seuss wrote it.  They do learn interesting things, and if I don’t hold much with adventure being the point of existence – a Jedi craves not these things, if I recall correctly – it’s entertaining and I find it eminently watchable, a significant bonus.

Dinosaur Train:  I’ve never been able to get through a single episode of this (“one, two, three toes!  It must be a Therapod!”  Seriously?).  But my kids love it.  It’s not offensive, I just don’t get it, except the part where the real-life paleontologist comes out and explains that we don’t actually know anything at all about any of the creatures we’re animating during the show.  I like that part.  And the jingle is catchy, but doesn’t grate.  A real bonus.

Sid the Science Kid: Cannot. Watch.  We turn it off.  Maybe the kids would like it, but we’re not going to find out.

I’d love to hear yours.  I know my sister loved Phineas and Ferb, but we don’t get into Disney or Cartoon Network shows here.  Except for Boomerang, because of Tom and Jerry, which for some reason my kids could watch all day.

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Gabriel has a flaming “diaper” rash, which is not in the place his diapers go.  It’s in the surrounding area under the cast, where air doesn’t circulate and the cast is wet and slimy.  As hard as we try to keep it dry, it’s just impossible.  We have been doing the following:

• augmenting the diaper with a dry washcloth to add additional absorbency
• using two kinds of diaper rash ointment in alternating 6-10 hour shifts
• drying the cast as best we can by aiming a cool hairdryer into the open parts
• praying
• letting him lie on his stomach for a half hour a few times a day

This seems to be helping.  It’s getting better, though I doubt that it will come all better until the cast comes off.  He’s not in any pain from the broken leg anymore, so he can lie on his stomach without pain, but not without eventual discomfort.  Keeping crumbs out of his cast is a difficulty as well, though not as difficult as we thought it might be, because he hardly eats.

And that’s a problem as well, that we’re not sure how to fix.  Gabriel doesn’t want to eat much.  We get a few bites of things into him, but he’s done fast.  He’s eating less than half what he used to (although he was always a picky eater).  He has good energy, though, and seems good.

He is also actually sleeping.  Two nights in a row, all through the night.  He won’t sleep in his bed upstairs, so we end up with him down in his spot on the couch (now fortified with a plastic mattress pad), but at least he’s sleeping and Jeanette and I are feeling a bit more normal.  I’m pretty sure the rash was the thing that was making him sleep poorly.  We couldn’t see it, because for two weeks he couldn’t really move at all because of the pain from the leg.  So I suppose it was inevitable, but it still made us feel like horrible parents.

I wouldn’t trade this.  I get great time holding Gabriel while Jeanette does his diaper and washes him.  It’s a blessed time for me, in spite of it all.  Or perhaps because of it all.  Have to think about that one, too.

With only two exceptions, and those are colored by the “necessity” of uncovering abuse where it doesn’t exist, every single person we’ve dealt with has been absolutely great.  Professional, competent, kind, even gentle.

• The ER staff at American Fork Hospital were exceedingly gentle with Gabriel when they took care of him there.  He was distraught, it was late, everyone was tired, but they splinted his leg with great care, and when they pricked him for his line, they were supremely careful of him and tried everything to help him be comfortable.
• The ambulance paramedics offered several things to help Gabriel be comfortable, and allowed Jeanette to ride with him to the hospital.  They were obviously sensible of the fact that this was a bad situation for us, and did what they could to make it better.
• The Trauma staff at Primary Children’s Hospital could hardly have been more courteous or kind to us.  They were faster than advertised at nearly everything, and we ended up leaving there a couple hours sooner than I expected.
• When it was time to go for Gabriel’s checkup after a week (yep, we’ve made it a week), instead of making us come all the way to upper downtown Salt Lake, they let us go to Riverton instead, about 30 miles closer to home.  They’ve given us suggestions for cleaning and de-smellifying the cast, which have been somewhat helpful.
• When we were coming to pick up the bill from AF Hospital, because the lady knew we’d have to be quick about it, she offered to bring the bill to the curb and hand it to us instead of making us come in, so that we could get back to Gabriel faster.  This offer by itself tells you a great deal about the people that work there.

Our impression of the medical system has bee greatly altered by these and other experiences.  We know that as messed up as the system itself is, that it is staffed by people that are absolutely the best in the world at what they do.  More than that, they’re great people.  In the days that follow, when I am proposing possible solutions to the medical mess the country is in, I want to make very sure that I’m clear about one thing: I don’t blame the people that are inside the system.  Few to none of them have anything to do with how we got where we currently are, and it is entirely possible that some of them would be hurt in the short term by what I think we have to do to fix it.  Such is not my intent, but I don’t think that anyone is going to come out of this unscathed, anyway.

For now, a hearty thanks to all of the many people that have helped us by performing jobs for us that we cannot perform for ourselves.  We all thank you and are very grateful for you.

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Gabriel slept in a bed in his old room last night, the crib having been dismantled.  He went to sleep far, far better than he ever has, and although he did wake up a couple of times (well, okay, six or eight times) between 12:30 and 4, he slept okay before that and after that.  I haven’t been home today, so I don’t have a report on how he’s done after that much sleep, but last night Jeanette and I did get more sleep than we have been getting, and in our own bed, too, so that’s not nothing.

Melatonin, in response to several recommendations, has been procured, and we’re going to give that a shot as well, and see if it helps him settle.

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We got Gabriel up and sat him near the table.  It required four telephone books and two bungee cords, and I doubt very much if this arrangement would meet any federal safety standard, but as you can see, he loved it.  Halelujah, it was like having our son back again.