How long will I have her? How much time will I get to spend with him?

My wife during the worst of her recent nights of suffering. I am a bit confused, folks. Anyone who has followed this blog at all has probably figured out by now that I am one of those people who cannot stay in one place for very long, a person who, just when he starts to get comfortable gets up and goes somewhere else.

Being a photographer and writer, I have been able to make a living, even if a scary one, always on the edge of disaster, doing this. Through my wanderings, I have even raised and supported a family.

But I have been so often gone from that family.

And lately, in my head, I have been planning and scheming on ways to get out and go, go - go again, travel again, leave everybody behind again. I have talked it over with Margie and she has said, yes, that is how you make a living and that is what you must do and I miss you but I will be fine. We will all be fine.

And now she gets hurt again and needs my care both day and night. I know that she will recover. but still, it makes me think. I have no statistics to back it up but I suspect that by this point in my life, probably 60 percent of all the people that I have ever met are dead and gone.

My time is limited. Her time is limited. The time for all of us is limited. How much longer will I have her? And how much of that time will I spend galavanting here and there?

Without ever taking on another job, I have enough work to do right now that I could spend every day for the rest of my life here, in this house, in my office, writing, and pulling photos together for this and that, working on all these unfinished books that I have constructed in part or in whole, just to tear apart and start all over again.

And if I did nothing else, I could never finish them all but I would be home and I could spend that much more time with her.

"Well," she said, "when you are home, you are always out in your office, day and night, working, and I don't see you anyway. But it is nice when I do."

And yet... I so greatly enjoyed the five weeks that I just spent on the Arctic Slope, and I saw so much potential work that I have yet to do there that I want to go back, again and again. Then there is the rest of Alaska, every region of which I have done work in but not enough - no, not nearly enough.

And India!

How did I ever wind up falling in love with India?

Well, I did. And I want to go back. Again and again. And the pages of the calendar just keep flipping past.

And then the truth is I lack the financing to do any of what I want to do, whether it be to travel, stay home, go here and there taking pictures and gathering stories, or to sit in my office to blog and make books.

Financially, my life is a nightmare. I am always riding the razor's edge, bankruptcy a thread away, yet, somehow, so far, every time I find myself going under a hand always seems to grab mine and yank me back up to the surface - but not out of the current.

And then how about this guy, little Kalib? He has helped his grandmother through this ordeal. 

And every moment that I get to spend with him is joy to me, even when he gets naughty. Why would I ever want to leave him? He changed so much in the seven weeks that we were separated!

I, a person who walks everyday, or rides a bike, or cross-country skis (I didn't this past winter due to still being in recovery from my injury but I sure plan to in the months to come) have only taken two walks since I returned home and Margie got hurt. Both were very short and Kalib came with me.

On one, we saw this boy. I have no idea who he is. A woman who appeared to be his mother was following behind and we stopped to ask her and to give her the address to this blog, but she had a dog with her and that dog raised such a ruckus that both she and I gave up and took our little people off in opposite directions.

Yesterday morning, after taking care of Margie's needs, I left her under Lavina's watch and took little Kalib to breakfast at Family. It was our first such outing alone together - just the two of us. I hope to have many outings with him. For some reason, I often picture the two of us, paddling a canoe through the wilderness together, stopping here and there to pitch our tent and cook our fish.

We will have rifles with us and if the country is beginning to turn red and yellow and the moose are in season, or the caribou, we will shoot.

These things may never happen, but in my mind I see them.

I don't know what could be much better than that.

Driving on, all the way to Palmer, we spot a woman telling a story to a cop. He appears to be most interested.

Before we left Family, Kalib went to the gumball machine. I reached into my pocket for a quarter, but I did not have one.

He still left happy.

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.

Catch-up #3: Margie's latest injury - how it happened

The day began well. You will recall that I had stated that I wanted to sleep ten, 20, perhaps even 40 years, with Margie at my side. As it turned out, I only slept for about six hours, but it was a pleasant six hours, there, in bed, with my wife snoozing soundly beside me, Jimmy, the black cat, curled atop my shoulder and Pistol-Yero, the tabby, coiled up alongside my ankles.

After I arose, I still felt extremely tired, because one cannot push himself for as long and hard as I have done, sleeping as little as I have slept, even going 40 hard, physical hours with no sleep at all, with no catch up, and then recover with six hours of sleep - no matter how pleasant that six hours might have been.

But I was not worried. I had not taken a day off since June 13 - when  Melanie and I took our little hike up in Hatcher's Pass - but I figured that I would now take two or three days off and I would nap, rest, walk and bike ride at will.

So I got out of bed, looking forward to a pleasant day, and went into the living room where I found the expectant mom, Lavina, looking quite pleasant and cozy herself, cuddled up on the couch with two cats and her iPhone.

Back in Anchorage, Melanie was about to close a purchase on a house with a basement apartment. Margie wanted to go in and help her move. I wanted to do nothing but lay around and be lazy, but she assured me that I could lay around and be lazy at Melanie's new place and watch everyone else do the work.

I did not believe this, but I decided to go in, anyway.

I regret that decision. If I had stayed home, I doubt that Margie would have taken her fall. It is not that anything that I did directly caused her to fall, but by going to town, I created a different dynamic for the day then if I had stayed home. 

Had I stayed put, Margie would have arrived on the scene a few minutes later than she did, for I drive faster then she does. The jackets that she carried down the steps would have already been taken down. They would not have blocked her vision. She would not have missed that extra step just after the turn out of the stairwell. She would not have fallen.

I do not blame myself; I just wish that I had stayed home to be lazy. Then everything would have turned out differently.

True, there is a tiny possibility that things would have turned out even worse - say, for example, that Margie might have collided with a big moose in a terrible crash with a much worse outcome, but this is a remote possibility and I do not believe it would have happened that way.

I think she would now be healthy and happy, rather than in misery and pain.

But I did climb into the Escape with her, I did take the wheel and I did drive toward Anchorage. Even before we left Wasilla, a freight train came rolling by, headed towards Fairbanks.

I was thrilled to see it and shot a frame of the engine as it rolled past.

Not long afterward, the caboose rolled past, too. I could not allow such a momentous event to pass by unphotographed.

After we drove into Anchorage, we headed toward the Duck Downs apartment that Melanie would soon vacate, but less than a block before we would have arrived, we came upon Melanie and Charlie driving away in his pickup truck. So we followed them to the house. I was amazed to see it, for it was much bigger and appeared to be nicer than I had expected.

The people that she was buying the house from had not yet moved out of the top floor and so she and Charlie planned to carry the few things that they had loaded into the back of the truck down into the basement apartment. They would then wait until another day to do anymore moving.

I explored the apartment, determined that if I go bankrupt and lose this house (a continual worry of mine for the past 27 years - and always with considerable justification, especially right now) that it would suffice until I could publish a best-seller and put us back in the black.

I then climbed back up to see what I could carry down and, as I approached the truck, saw Margie carrying some jackets. That was all she intended to carry down.

I grabbed a couple of pairs of cross-country skis and then headed back toward the house. As I neared the top of the stairwell, I heard Margie shriek. Then I heard her cry in that desperate, painful, pitiful way that she had when she had fallen in the street in Washington, DC.

"Dad!" Melanie, who was with her, called from the lower doorway. "Come quick! Mom's hurt!"

I found her lying on her tummy, crying, and screaming out in pain.

We talked, she calmed down, rolled onto her back. She then decided that, although it hurt, she was okay and just needed a few minutes to pull herself together. She pulled her right knee up and then tried to do the same with her left.

This caused her to scream once again. She could not bend that knee.

I knew then that we had to get her to the emergency room.

It was a struggle, accompanied by much screaming, but we raised her from the floor. Charlie then picked her up and carried her in his arms up the stairs and to the car.

As we tried to figure out how to get her into the car, Jane, the woman who Melanie is buying the house from, showed up with a wide strap of webbing and announced that she was a physical therapist and has a great deal of experience hoisting hurt people about.

So she put the strap around Margie's waist. I went to the other side to help pull her up from the driver's side as Jane and Charlie hoisted her into the front passenger seat.

Melanie came with us as I drove Margie to the emergency room at the Alaska Native Medical Center. Lisa met us there. Eventually, we got Margie into a wheelchair and then inside, where she was sent to X-ray.

We were relieved to learn that she had not rebroken her kneecap fracture from January. My first thought was that this meant that she would be fine - just sore for awhile - but I was wrong.

Denise, the physicians assistant who examined her, told us that, judging from the extreme pain Margie was suffering, there must be ligament damage. An x-ray cannot look at ligaments. It would take a CAT scan. Before this could happen, she wanted Margie to go home and get some bed rest for about one week to give the inflammation that had caused her knee to swell to watermelon size to subside a bit and her pain to ease.

She expected Margie to be laid up for a total of about six weeks.

Denise examines Margie's leg.

Margie in excruciating pain. To help her deal with it, Denise asked what kind of pain killers Margie had been prescribed for her original knee injury. Our minds went blank, so she started reading off a list of pain meds, until she came to Tylenol-Codeine. 

We both remembered Margie taking those, so that is what she prescribed. What we had forgotten is that this came later - hydro-codeine, a more powerful painkiller, was what had come first.

As it would turn out, Margie would need all the pain-killer power she could get. She was also prescribed Motrin, to help reduce the inflammation.

We picked up the drugs from the pharmacy and then left, Melanie riding with us, Lisa following. Margie could not take her drugs until she ate something, so we stopped at the Taco Bell on Muldoon and placed an order for a bean burrito.

As we progressed through the drive-through toward the bean burrito (and a few things for me, as well), I looked in the mirror and saw this little dog behind us.

As for what lay ahead, well, hell. That's what is has been - hell. 

I must say that the US Indian Health Service and the Alaska Native Medical Center has been of great benefit to this family over the decades. Great benefit. They have my gratitude.

I trust that in this case, they will yet prove to be of great benefit, but as to what was about to come, they failed my Margie. If their job is simply to read what is written down on paper and follow procedure, then they succeeded.

But if their job is to look at a real, injured, human being and then do all that they possibly can to minimize the pain and suffering of that individual, then they failed miserably - and it is Margie who has had to bear the misery.

Catch up, # 2: Jacob and Lavina give me a birthday present that I can't see until it becomes 9 months old

Not long after we placed our orders at Moose's Tooth, Jacob and Lavina handed me a late birthday card and then a present. By the shape, size, and weight of the package, I knew that it was a framed picture. I figured that it would be of their child - my grandson - and wondered if it would be a print of a photograph that I had taken, or that one of them had taken.

I was half-right: it was a picture of their child and my grandchild, but the odds are just as good that it is of my granddaughter as my grandson. 

It was an ultrasound of our second grandchild, due in February. This is also how they announced that Lavina was pregnant when it was Kalib who was a fetus. We had all met at Moose's Tooth for Mother's Day. When Margie opened her present, she found an ultrasound of the fetus that became Kalib.

Little Kalib - come February or so, his life is going to change dramatically - and he does not even suspect.

Catch up, #1: I travel from my home to my home

I was going to write a bit more about this trip, from my community home that is the Arctic Slope of Alaska to my home where my house and family is in Wasilla, but I was exhausted to begin with and the events of the past couple of days have left me even more so.

So I will be brief, just so I can catch up in, say, three or four posts, which I will put up in fairly rapid succession.

The trip began here, on the tarmac at the airstrip in Nuiqsut, where I boarded the Beechcraft chartered by the North Slope Borough Iñupiat History, Language and Culture Commission.

Kathy Agiak, the commission chair, takes a look at her cellphone. Mine (ATT) showed bars in Nuiqsut, but all my attempts to make a call on it failed. Behind her is James Aiken, an Elder from Atqasuk.

We flew to Barrow, where two little dogs clad in dresses waited at the Alaska Airlines terminal to fly south. 

On the jet south, I sat next to Carolyn and Nick Smith, tourists from Virginia. They had spent no time in Barrow other than their wait for us oncoming passengers to board, but had been part of a tour group that rode the Alaska Railroad into Denali National Park. They were most impressed with the ride range of wildlife they had seen there, ranging from wolves to grizzly bears, and even a fox nipping at the heels of a caribou.

Everytime the caribou whipped around to face the fox, it would run backwards. Sounds like the fox, which could not bring a caribou down, was having great fun being a tormentor.

From there, they had gone on to Fairbanks, where the tour became a bus ride. They traveled up the Dalton Highway, stopped at the Arctic Circle to feed the mosquitoes and get the official certificate, then continued on to Deadhorse, where they boarded the flight that next flew on to Barrow, where I boarded.

Somewhere between the Brooks Range and the Yukon River.

Back in Anchorage, Margie drove up to the roadside pickup and I was just about to climb in with her and Kalib when I spotted this cat, waiting to be picked up. I believe that his name is Cleo, from Colorado, and that he had just moved to Anchorage to make a new life for himself, but I could be mistaken.

Margie and Kalib picked me up. I had not seen either for seven weeks. I wondered if Kalib would still remember me. He studied me carefully, and with wonder. He was most grateful to be descended from such a man.

As for Margie - see how good she looks? How happy? How healthy? Finally, after her long recuperation?

Barely three days have now past. I wish she still looked so good.

Except for Rex and Stephanie, who had gone off to Seward to study sailboats, everyone agreed to meet us at Moose's Tooth to welcome me home with pizza, and to give me a late birthday party.

We had to wait for 50 minutes to get inside. This gave Kalib the chance to stand in the light rain and study passers by.

None of us, least of all him, had any clue as to what his parents were about to give me for as a birthday present.

It was such a special present that I will end this post here, and give it a separate post, all of it's own.

I took a lot of pictures of all family members gathered inside the Moose's Tooth and had planned to run a major spread.

But I must move on.