Surgery Update

Jack had his shoulder surgery Monday.  We got home at about 6:30pm.  I started him on the pain pills right away, based on all the warnings from friends, family, acquaintances and the doctor that the pain would be bad. 

They called the next day and brought him in for physical therapy on Tuesday.  Which was fine.  Because the nerve block had not warn off yet.

But it did, later that evening, and it was bad.  He's a strong man, but this brought him to his knees.  At 2:30am he finally asked me to call the emergency number and the covering doctor told me to double his pain medication and add 4 Advil every 8 hours as an anti-inflammatory.  Since Jack made a big deal with the doctor that he didn't want Vicodin, so he was given Nucynta, which is usually used for patients with a sensitivity to Vicodin.  Once the double pills kicked in, it was like someone took a hundred pounds off him...

We changed the dressings yesterday and again today.  5 incisions, 10 stitches, total.  1 big bruise.  Yesterday he wanted to take a shower, so we covered the incision site, he took his sling off - and was shocked to find that he couldn't hold the weight of his arm up on his own!  I got my old sling out and he wore it in the shower.  You always feel so much better once you shower...  He said today's therapy session was a bit more intense, that his shoulder is moving better than they expected.  Not well, mind you, but it's moving which is a good thing.

And then there's the snow.  It snowed, about a good 5 inches.  Light and fluffy, thank goodness, because I had to clean off the car and shovel around it so we could get to the gym.  Danny, our neighbor, shoveled our sidewalk, a path up our driveway and our steps early this morning.  When I went out to clean off the car and the path to the car so Jack could get out there safely, he came out yelling for me to get back in the house, that he'd take care of it, he told me he would...  I explained he could happily do the rest, that I was just getting Jack out the door to go to therapy.  Then he said I should have called him and he'd have cleaned off my car...

It's nice to see people help Jack once in a while; he's always the one doing for others, it's ingrained in him.

Tonight I'm going to suggest we play a game, watch a movie, do something together that is interactive and will hopefully keep his attention - he's so bored and depressed.  And being laid up is so hard for him.  T came over yesterday for a couple of hours and he got so tired but he didn't want to tell T to leave...  So then he felt tired and cranky... 

I'm working from home today. It's so inconvenient to not be able to ALT TAB between windows; my database opens on a separate desktop so I can't use that shortcut. I can ALT TAB to the database from my desktop, but once in there, I have to minimize the windows to get back out to my laptop desktop. AND, to make it worse, the ENTER button in the numbers panel doesn't work - I have to use the ENTER button in the alpha panel. Everything is ISBN driven so it's a pain to have to remember to go to the alpha keyboard to enter any field entry. If I don't I'm erroring out all the time.

I'm going back to work Monday, but I'm going to talk with my manager about working from home a day or two a week for a few weeks - I know it's going to be a fight at my end, with Jack, but he's not one to entertain himself with TV or a book, like me.  He needs to be DOING and right now there's no DOING...

Will post more soon...