The ordeal that my wife has so far faced - I wanted hospital care for her

Just today, the fourth day, the situation has begun to improve. I think we can reasonably manage it now, all on our own. But the previous three days and nights have all been hell; miserable, miserable, miserable; what little sleep could be had was for me always interrupted by Margie's screams of agony and for her prevented by the terrible pain itself. Simple, two minute tasks that everyone must perform have taken two, even three hours to carry out and it has taken the assistance of at least three strong adults each time. And very soon afterward, the task would need to be performed all over again.

To help get her through this, four adult family members have taken leave from work. It quickly became obvious to me and all the others here that she needed hospital care, at least for the first few days. The demands of caring for her in a way that would alleviate as much pain as possible were beyond our capability and facility. 

I will begin with the third night, when neither Margie or I got more than a few minutes sleep straight at any point. Every ten to fifteen minutes throughout the night - and I do not exagerate - Margie would scream out in terrible pain. This was how often the muscle spasms struck in her left leg. Each time one did, it pulled at her injured knee. This knee has been excruciatingly sensitive to movement and touch. The lightest touch upon her leg or foot could cause her to scream out in pain, as could the tiniest movement, often imperceptible to the eye.

This is why it would take us so long to perform those two minute tasks, for which we never moved her farther than one foot away from the bed.

So the third night passed with virtually no sleep for either of us - me, because the moment I would begin to doze would be the instant that her scream would jar me to full awake. Once awake, I was helpless to do a single thing for her. It is obvious why she could not sleep.

She took all her medications as prescribed.

Now I will bounce back to the first night, the first day, after we left the Taco Bell on Muldoon in Anchorage where I had bought her a burrito so that she could take her pain medication. I drove home, with her sitting in the back seat and, as usual, it took close to one hour. For her, it was a miserable ride.

Once I got her home I had to get her from the car into the house - but remember, the slightest movement, the slightest touch, would cause her to scream out in pain. We retrieved the crutches she had used after her last injury, but while there were no broken bones this time, whatever damage has been inflicted upon her ligaments has brought even more severe pain than did the break. After about 15 minutes of struggle, punctuated by scream upon scream, we had not succeeded in moving her more than a foot from the car.

We then decided that we needed a wheelchair, just to transport her, but we did not have one. So I came here, to my office, retrieved my desk chair and took it outside. Then, through many more screams, Jacob and Caleb slowly lowered her into that chair while I attempted to keep her leg straight and her knee from bending by supporting her brace wih my right hand just below the knee and her ankle with my left hand.

Once we got her into the chair, we could not really roll it because our driveway is not paved and the tiny wheels of my office chair would not roll over rocks, gravel and dirt. So we picked the chair up by its wooden arms, carried her into the house and sat her down in the middle of the front room. We padded another chair with pillows and placed her injured leg upon it in a way that would keep it straight.

She was now so exhausted by the pain and effort that she wanted to do nothing but sit in that spot without moving. So she sat there for about an hour, maybe longer, then decided that it was time to move to the single bed at the foot of our bed. This is where she had slept after I had I got my titanium replacement for the shoulder that I shattered on June 12, 2008. It is where she continued to sleep after she fell and broke her left kneecap and right wrist January 20, even before I had healed enough to share our bed with her.

So remember how last Saturday night, after I returned home from the Arctic Slope, I looked forward to climbing into my bed with my wife who I had not seen for seven weeks?

That night, last Saturday night, the night before she fell again, was the first night that we had slept together in our bed in fourteen months. FOURTEEN MONTHS! Who knows when we will next spend another night together in the same bed?

So we moved her slowly down the hall and then to the bed. Once at the bed, with me always trying to keep her leg straight, it took us three hours, again punctuated by many pained screams and shreiks, to place and position her.

No sooner had we accomplished this when she needed to use the restroom. We could not get her to the bathroom, but we did manage to raise her from the bed and we did manage to take care of the matter and then to place her back upon the bed - and again, the entire process was torn by the screams and shrieks and it took another two hours.

Altogether too soon, it would be time to do it all again. Any reader who has been with this journal for awhile will understand that I entered this new nursing job with its 24 hour shift followed immediately by 24 hour shift already in a state of exhaustion, yet it had to be done and so I did it. 

I knew that if she was going to get the care that she needed to keep her pain and suffering at a more tolerable level, she needed to go back to the hospital and be admitted. Yet, she had been through too much, suffered too much and was too exhausted to try now. The car was parked just outside the front door - less than a minute walk away out the bedroom, down the hall, through the front room and then outside - but it felt as far away and inaccessible as the moon.

It was late now, well after-hours, and there was nothing to do but to give Margie a chance to rest as best she could - which would not be much rest at all - and then see how we could get her back to the hospital. In the meantime, I decided to call the Alaska Native Medical Center, explain the situation and see if there was any kind of advice or help that I could get.

I called the main number and was transferred to the emergency room. I explained the situation to the person who answered. In an impatient tone of voice, she told me that she could neither offer any advice nor connect me with a doctor, nurse, or anyone who could, as it was against policy to make any kind of diagnosis or give any kind of advice over the phone.

The remainder of the first night and of the wee and early hours of the morning passed with many shrieks and screams of pain and with almost no sleep.

Come the second day, I was so exhausted that I could hardly function; I had strained my back in two places, but still my wife needed my help. I felt guilty for thinking of my own comfort and fatigue when I knew that what Margie was going through was so much worse.

Over the course of the next day, we spent some time on the phone with various people at ANMC, all of whom were most courteous and all expressed a desire to help. In the end, concerning the matter of further hospital care, a gentleman called me back and we engaged in a fairly lengthy discussion. This was the gist of his message: the chart for your wife has been examined. This is not the kind of injury that warrants hospital care. You can bring her back in. She will then have to be reexamined - the examination will mean we have to move her leg around and bend her knee. This will aggravate her injury even more. Then we will almost certainly send her home again and she will be in worse condition than she is right now.

This was followed by two more days of no sleep, of multiple two-hour, even three-hour, screaming ordeals. Her pain killer was changed and strengthened, yet not much seemed to change. 

This is me, late last night, lying on our bed not far from the one where Margie lay in pain. As he always is, Jim was there to help me through the ordeal. Not long afterward, an amazing thing happened. Margie improved dramatically. The two hour ordeal dropped to 20 minutes, her pain became bearable and her screams ceased. My help alone became sufficient to get her through it. Come morning, Jacob was able to drive back to Anchorage and return to work.

Lisa works at ANMC and had been busy serving as a go between to help her mom at least get a prescription for a stronger pain-killer, plus muscle relaxants. Perhaps that is what finally made the difference. Thank you, Lisa. And thank you Jacob, Lavina and Caleb for what you have done to help us get through this hard ordeal to this point.

On one of those miserable nights, Kalib looked out the door into the backyard and spotted a bull moose in velvet.

The bull moose, in velvet, in our backyard.

And so passes this recent chapter of our lives, right here, in Wasilla, Alaska.

On Father's Day, the mast snapped and then we ate at Bombay Valley

Rex called from Anchorage to announce that, for father's day, he would bring his sailboat out - the very same sailboat that launched this blog. A brisk wind blew, so he planned to drive straight to Memory Lake, give me a call from there and launch. 

Then I could come and he would take me on a little ride around the lake. Next, Melanie called to say that she was on her way out and Lisa would be leaving Anchorage a bit after she did.

So Melanie arrived with Charlie and we decided to go get a coffee. Rex called immediately after the decision, and said he would soon launch and to bring him a coffee, too.

Finally, we arrived at Memory Lake. Rex and his boat were a tiny dot on the other side of the lake, but no sail could be seen.

A man sat on the shore, fishing, and told us that Rex had really caught the wind and had been sailing fast, when suddenly his mast broke. Rex then called to report that he could not make any headway trying to paddle against the wind, so he was just going to let it blow him to the west end of the lake. We could pick him up there.

So, off we went. None of us had ever driven to the west end and we did not know how to get there. Melanie pulled up a map on her iphone, put in our GPS location and then navigated.

She got us there, but it was private property.

Still, Rex needed to be picked up so we picked him up.

Back at the house, a bit tired, slightly discouraged but not at all daunted, Rex uses Muzzy for a footrest. I hope to have some free time in August. I will be lucky if I can take even a single day off between now and then - maybe by late July.

But if I succeed at my goal, then we can go sailing in August. Out on the high seas. In gale force winds. The mast will be reinforced then. It will be great fun. Maybe we will wind up in China. I have long wanted to visit China.

We could wind up in Russia, but I've already been there.

Stark and harsh though it was, I liked it, but I would rather go to China this time.

Thus followed a great debate about what the kids should do for me for Father's Day.

In the end, we decided to go out for dinner at Bombay Valley Indian Food Restaurant. It is kind of amazing that there is an Indian food restaurant in Wasilla, but there is.

The food was really, really, hot - hotter than anything I had in India.

It was good, though. Very good. 

Yet, still, when the taste of Vasanthi's excellent cooking still lingers... along with the master chef's that catered Soundarya's wedding... and the other great cooks that we had, including Sandy herself, who cooked our very last meal in India...

It would just be unfair to compare, so I will just say Bombay Valley is quite good and, if you can't get to India, I would recommend it.

And my food was free, because I'm a dad, and at Bombay Valley, dads ate free today.

Camera shy man and his cat - fur on and off the body; a tiny bus in India...US and India come together in one little baby

I meet many people when I walk about and one of them I shall call Bart, who I see often, but never photograph, because he is very camera shy. We stand and talk about all kinds of things, from his stint in the military to his recent heart attack to my shoulder injury, but mostly we talk about his cats, Varmit and Jesse James.

When I got there today he was a bit  worried about Varmit. I was not certain how long he had been out there with the cats, but he said that Varmit had disappeared. He had not seen him for quite awhile, whereas Jesse was staying close.

As soon as he said this, I saw Varmit looking at me through the bushes and grasses. "There he is!" I said, pointing right at the little creature you see here.

Actually, I took this picture first, but I wanted to introduce "Bart" right away, even if you can not see his face, but only his pants, shoes and socks.

So the pictures are out of order.

I don't care. Life is often out of order.

Varmit walks to Dan. I never did see Jesse James. As you can see, Varmit is wearing his fur, just the way a cat ought to. 

I walked on and soon, up ahead aways, saw something furry that looked dead and mangled, like maybe it had been run over by several cars. I wondered if it was a dog or a cat, but when I got close, I saw that it was a bit of moose fur.

So what was this chunk of moose fur doing here? How had the moose been killed? When? It is way out of season. Did someone poach the moose? Did some dogs kill a calf? Did the moose die of natural causes and then get torn up by dogs?

Was it shot legally in moose season, and then maybe this piece of fur got frozen somewhere, or was stored somewhere and now it is here?

Did I know this moose?

Did I photograph it when it was alive?

I didn't know. I will never know. And neither will you.

Unless it was poached, and you are the poacher and you happen to also be a reader of my blog.

Arrest yourself then, you damn poacher! Turn yourself in!

These dogs were dressed in their fur, just like dogs ought to be.

I have been a little frustrated about my India take, because I simply have not had any time to delve into it and edit it and, for two weeks time, I have a lot of material. A lot. I could blog India regularly all summer long.

And I still have two ceremonies from Sandy's wedding day yet to edit and post!

No time!

So today, just to keep the idea of India alive, I picked a folder at random, dropped at random into a point near the middle, drug about 10 images to my editing program and then checked to see what popped up, so that I could post it.

And this little bus popped up. It was so small that it almost should not be called a bus, but it was too big to be a van. So I call it a bus.

And this beautiful lady was sitting right there, towards the back.

A little bit in front of her was this young girl.

And then there was this man in a turbin, and a young boy.

And this is the place that they had come to visit. It is called Aihole, and it is a magnificent series of ruins of temples and other buldings constructed in the sixth through eighth centuries. These are school children who had come on a field trip to observe some of their own heritage first hand.

Hopefully, before the summer ends, I will be able blog it better.

And here is a little bit of America and India blended together; of my family and Soundarya’s family, united as one family in the ultimate way: 

Ada Lakshmi Iyer, the baby that I told you about last night, in the hands of her father, Vivek, my nephew-in-law, but I just call him Nephew.

My sister, Mary Ann, Ada Lakshmi's gramma, took the picture. She did not send me one with my niece Khena, her daughter and Ada's mom.

Had Vivek and Khena never came together, none of this would have ever happened. I would not even know Soundarya existed and I certainly would not have photographed her wedding. I would probably never even have stepped into India, not even once, over my entire life.

Unbearable thought. Just unbearable.

Thank you, Khena and Vivek, for bringing us all together.

And congratulations!

That's a lot of hair on your beautiful daughter!

A Citabria, a ragdoll and a baby

I had planned to leave for the Arctic Slope Sunday, but then Margie said that I should wait until Monday, to give whomever of our children might be around the chance to honor me on Father's Day. So I agreed to wait. By today, I realized that I could not possibly accomplish all that I must do before I leave by Monday, so I put the date of departure to Barrow off until Tuesday afternoon. Then Wednesday morning I will leave for Point Lay.

Having all this to do, I have basically spent the entire day sitting right here, where I sit now, in front of my computer, working my fingers off. And that is pretty much all that I will have time to do between now and my departure.

Still, I must walk a little bit, pedal a bike a little, and as I walked, an airplane flew overhead. Do you recognize it? It is a Citabria, like mine, like the one that I crashed on that dreadful day in Mentasta, Alaska.

And yet the day was so happy, for that was the day that Katie John celebrated her victory over the State of Alaska, the day that the right of she and her family to catch salmon at their traditional home was finally recognized.

And everybody who came to the celebration, from Governor Knowles to Katie's Athabascan attorney, Heather Kendall-Miller, drove by the wreckage of the Running Dog and they all said, "My goodness! Someone crashed an airplane. I hope no one was hurt."

And then they discovered that it was me that had crashed and I carried on, and photographed the celebration, because that is what I had come to Mentasta to do.

I got some good pictures, too. I wrote up a decent enough story.

Do you feel the longing?

And it is more than longing. Not having that airplane is a damned hardship. My jet ticket to Barrow will cost nearly $800. My roundtrip ticket from Barrow to Point Lay over $500. And then it is imperative that I visit as many of the other North Slope villages as I can.

All those tickets will cost money.

As airplanes go, the Running Dog was a gas sipper, not a guzzler, and I could even put car gas in it. I probably could have made the whole trip for not much more than the cost of that round trip fare between Barrow and Point Lay.

And I could come and go when it suited me, not on someone else's schedule. And I could carry more gear, including a good knife, a rifle and bullets, without ever going through security.

And it was a whole lot more fun.

As I walked, a lady friend from Serendipity picked me up and took me to her house for coffee. Her ragdoll cat was there and so was her husband. And a little dog.

We talked about moose and such.

My niece, Khena, delivered a baby today in Minneapolis.

Ada Lakshmi Iyer is the name of the little beauty and there are pictures of her on Facebook, taken by my sister, Mary Ann, the proud Gramma. Hey, baby sister - how can this word, "gramma," apply to you?

And yet, given the ages of our children, you and I could both have been grandparents over ten years ago.

Khena's proud husband, by the way, is Vivek, first cousin to Soundarya.

Vasanthi, Vivek's mother, is planning to move in with them in September to help take care of the baby and will stay until January. Come the Minnesota winter, she will have a brand new experience.

But then I know India Indian people who live and work on the Arctic Slope, so I suspect that she will do okay, but there will probably be times when she won't like it at all. 

Wasilla: moose drinks by the road - boy does wheelie; India - Cat family suffers mishap

This afternoon as I drove down the road looking for a burrito, I saw a moose kneeling in a four-wheeler track, drinking water. She stopped and raised her head to look at me as I drove by.

Shortly thereafter, I saw this kid doing a wheelie down the road in front of me, by the sign advertising a yard sale. I did not go to the yard sale. I probably could have paid $3.00 for a painting there that was worth $3 million. 

Once again, I have squandered the casual fortune.

So here I am, back in India. This scene of a mother cat nursing her kittens is serene, but the event was not. I don't have the energy to tell the story again right now, but you can find it right here, on Grahamn Kracker's Kracker Cat Blog.