The Day After the Accident

Hi all,

Many of you I know and the rest of you I hope one day to meet--under happier circumstances than these. I am partnering with Matt and Karla to be the central clearing house for inquiries and information about Beth. I plan to update this bog daily and will also check frequently to answer questions as best I can. This will relieve Matt and others of the communication sharing, at least for now, when it is a time of high stress.

I don't want to assume that everyone has the same information, so it's important to say at the outset that Beth's injuries are not life-threatening, although the extent of them clearly points to a long recovery. 

I visited Beth today at St. Anthony's Central in Denver for a couple of hours. Matt was there and so were Janet and Marianne. Although Beth is terribly beat up by the fall, her spirits were strong. She must have said, "I'm so lucky" 20 times. She is really feeling gratitude for her life and for catching "her break," as she called it. She was surprisingly lucid for the amount of pain medication she had on board. (To file under the "Life's Little Ironies" column: she has a bracelet on her arm that says "FALL RISK." One for the scrapbook!) 

Medical details: They were supposed to take Beth into surgery today at 3:30 to repair her arm--her humerus was broken like an "x" so they are going to put a plate in there to stabilize it. The surgery was delayed until 5:30 and was supposed to take 3 hours, so no news as of yet. Her collapsed lung is a concern, and she has breathing exercises to do once an hour to try to get it up and running again. She has a tube that is draining the blood and fluid from it constantly, and she also has an epidural for pain that she monitors herself. When the nurse asked what her pain level was on the old 1-10 scale (with 10 being unbearable) she said it was a 4, so that's pretty good, all things considered. The next surgery is scheduled for Wednesday when they will repair her ankle on the right. It turns out she has five ribs fractured in the front and nine in the back, all of which they expect to heal without surgical measures--along with her clavicle, a couple of lumbar vertibrae, something to do with the cervical spine (8 weeks in a collar), her ankle, two metatarsals, and a chipped hip bone. Sorry if I don't have all the details exactly right, but I'm pretty sure that's close.

She will be in the ICU for the next 3-5 days, and then likely moved out to another room in the hospital. She is very bruised and scraped and swollen, but she has that Beth fighting look in her eye, which was amazing--and familiar!--to see. The nursing staff seem friendly and competent and very much at home with this kind of trauma.

Visiting hours are from 8-2, 4-6:30, and 8-10. Matt and I were discussing the possibility of coordinating other people to visit in these early days to give him some needed down time--probably late at night in particular. I will be there tomorrow night and if someone wants to take Wed., that would be great. They really don't like more than two people at once in there but they kind of looked the other way today with four of us--we were doing our best to behave! We can try posting comments here about visiting/supporting as Matt will be following this and I'll be staying on top of it as well--we'll see how it goes and change course when needed. Please only call Matt if you need to reach him urgently. You can, however, post comments here to Beth as much as you'd like and he will read them to her--she won't be getting emails and phone calls for a while.

Karla and Steph are in the planning stages for a longer-term plan for help and support once Beth is released to home care. Details to come as that gets worked out. There will be lots of opportunity to help out with appointments, food, household stuff, etc. As Beth pointed out today: "I guess I won't be driving for a while." 

I think that's it for now. I'll update again tomorrow after I talk with Matt. Sending love and healing thoughts Beth's way.