Miracle Story #17 (Part 2 of 3)
Amy:
“When I brought him home on December 23rd, what could he do?
Um, not a lot. Not a lot.
He was starting to eat with modified silverware. He could not stand by himself yet. I was transferring him in and out of the wheelchair.
He was in the wheelchair for a really long time. He got foot drop really bad.
Foot drop is a neurological condition where instead of your feet being at the ninety degree angle they’re supposed to be at, they look more like this…(motions a hanging down)
I think it’s a common side effect of a brain injury.
We had these special boots, but they didn’t work…the first five hundred dollar pair of shoes. (laughs)
So I took him to a podiatrist and the podiatrist said, “Well there’s nothing that we can really do.”
My oldest daughter had been in a really bad wreck when she was sixteen, and had crushed her ankle. So I decided to take Russ to her foot doctor to see what he would tell me.
I just hauled this poor man everywhere. (laughs)
And I took him everywhere with me.
So I took him to the ortho doctor and he was like, “Oh yeah, I can fix this. We’re going to make some slices in his achilles tendon and we’re going to move his foot back up.”
Well when they got his foot back up then all of his toes curled.
So they sliced all of his toes on his right foot. We thought we were going to have to do the left foot, but the left foot kind of settled itself down.
They’re not perfect yet, but they’re better.
Had him in a cast. Went and got a new cast at six weeks.
The podiatrist and every physical therapist, every one of them were just like, “Oh he’s probably going to be in a wheel chair for at least a year.”
And I was like, “Oh hell no. No. He wants to walk now. We’re not sitting in a wheel chair for a year.”
They had him up and trying to walk with him at rehab but he had such issues with his feet that it was almost impossible. They had started him walking at rehab with a walker. And I was just bound and determined that we weren’t sitting in a wheel chair for a year if we didn’t have to.”
Russ:
“At the first rehab I was walking with those rails. Kind of like parallel bars.”
Amy:
“Yeah, they’d have one person in front of him and one person behind him. And I was right next to him. We were just trying to get his feet to move.”
Russ:
“It was like…twenty feet or so.”
Amy:
“So we did that for a while, and then we had surgery.
I decided in January that I was going to get him a personal trainer at the Y. He still goes and does that twice a week.
And as soon as we got that walking cast, Emily had him up and walking.
That was the video I sent you.
And he cried.
And I cried.
Everybody was just telling us, “You can’t do this. And you can’t do that.”
“Oh yes we can.”
I really have a good faith base. I’ve gotten away from church as an organization.
God has gotten me through so much.
And like I told you the other day, I always say God takes care of kids and idiots. I’ve got both bases covered. (laughs)
There have been some pretty tough times.
I did grow up in the church. And we did a lot of missionary work. And I saw how God worked in people’s lives.
I think that God helps those who help themselves.
And sometimes when you’re not able to help yourself.
I’m not going to say that I’ve been perfect at this. There was no book to tell me.
I knew it would be hard. I knew bringing Russ home would be really, really hard. But I knew that no matter what, for at least as long as I could do it, I could get him further than anybody else.
So we did it.
But there’s still….
He can shower himself now. He can do laundry. He can do dishes.
He can’t so much cook, more for safety reasons.
We’re starting to write again.
We sing in the car. Singing is great speech therapy.”
Russ:
“I like country. I like rock and roll too. It really doesn’t matter.”
Amy:
“It does matter. You don’t like rap.”
(all laughing)
Russ:
“Yeah, I don’t like that. At all.”
Amy:
“It’s been a long road. It’s going to be a long road.
I’m in the process of getting him a job. They have a vocational rehab. We’re going to do that and hopefully…
If you qualify for government disability, which obviously he did, there is a state program that actually believes that there’s no reason that everybody can’t get a job. What they’ll do, once I get the paperwork in, is that they will test him and see if he needs someone to shadow him at work.
There are two big drawbacks we’re dealing with right now.
One of the biggest drawbacks right now…the dexterity in his fingers is still not great. He still has obviously, kind of like Parkinson’s disease as far as the shaking and stuff.
And he has very, very limited short term memory.
Long term memory did not get hit. He can tell you his best friend’s name from the third grade.
But can he tell you what we ate for breakfast? Maybe not.
(all laugh)
We both have really, really good sense of humors. And sometimes people just look at us.” (laughs)
Russ:
“She calls me a goldfish all the time. A goldfish has short memory.” (laughs)
Amy:
“Yeah, only like three seconds.” (laughs)
Russ:
“Her oldest daughter gets mad at her for calling me goldfish.”
Amy:
“You just have to laugh through it to find the pluses every day. Because the sucky part of it is so hard it’s like…wow.
It has not been easy.
Work.
I was really down on myself that I did not have a productive year at work.
But then you stop and look at everything we got done as a family in that year…
There’s not much research on ABI patients. Because they just rarely make it.
What you’ve got to understand is that every day you’re beating odds every single day that you learn something new.
I do give God a lot of the glory.
He must give me some patience or something because I haven’t killed him yet. (laughs)
Probably the worst thing that I’ve ever had to do, and I’ve done everything to this poor man…if he has surgery or a procedure, I have to give him shots in his stomach.
It brings me to tears to have to do that to him.
And he just lays there.
And every time, every single time, no matter how bad it hurts he’ll say, “Oh it’s okay honey, that one didn’t hurt too bad.” (laughs)
Russ:
“My stomach looks like a war zone. I have all kinds of bruises.”
Amy:
“Thank God we’re done with those.
We’re good people. You don’t think this is going to happen to you.
You don’t ever wake up and think…
For him, we had checked into long-term care, but his asthma was so bad he would have never qualified for it so…
I am his long-term care.
We’ve been together since 2010, minus a year. He had a mid-life crisis and he dumped me.”
Russ:
“Kicking her to the curb was the worst idea I ever had.” (laughs)
Amy:
“And now I’m like, “Well, look what you got now. Now you’re stuck with me for good.”
Russ:
“I asked her to marry me.”
Amy:
“Yeah you did. On Valentine’s Day last year. For the second time you big jerk. (all laugh)
Between the two of us we have eight kids.”
Russ:
“Two of them are out of high school. Andi lives in Wichita and Bre lives in Mulvane.”
Amy:
“And then we have a freshman in college and we have three of the boys. They’re twins that are fourteen, and a thirteen year old.
And then Russ has two boys but…”
Russ:
“They stay over at their mom’s mostly. They rarely come over and see me anymore.
That hurts.”
Amy:
“That’s really hard. What’s been the hardest part of it is…and I’m not blaming anyone at all….life goes on for everybody, you know?
People get busy.
And Russ’s world is..not so much anymore, but time stood still for him.
Everyone else is still going to work every day and we’re worried about…
Like the ice storm today.
I need to get him in and out. I want him to go to the store with me because it’s an activity to go and do. But, I also have to be safe about it.
It’s not just me sliding along the ice. It’s him going to pull me down with him. (laughs)
He goes to his brother’s once a week and works in the shop with them.
When I drop him off his goal is to go get dirty.
I want you to be dirty and greasy and yucky when I go pick you up.”
Russ:
“I get greasy. I always have to take a shower when I get back, because I stink. I smell like grease.”
Amy:
“He’s going to start going to another one of his friends’ body shops that he used to work at a long time ago, on Tuesdays.
We do the independent living center. That’s a great resource. On Mondays.
They have a cooking class and then crafts. Which sounds dumb, but it gives him someone to hang out with.
Someone like him that’s not going to judge him.
The downtown YMCA has been absolutely fabulous.
Lauren, she’s just like what I showed you. You think you’re just going to hire a personal trainer, and she’s probably like one of our kids now.
We love her to pieces.
Emily left in March maybe, three or four months into it. Her husband took a job up north and they moved to Minnesota. So we’ve had Lauren since then.
He takes better direction from her. It’s one thing for me to tell him to go do his exercises, or 'come on let’s do your exercises.'
She calls him Goof Troop.
“Okay Goof Troop, let’s go.”
One of the side effects of a brain injury is that your body goes back to the fetal position. So it’s getting his shoulders back up, and sitting up straight. Getting all that worked out, stretched out.
He’s probably more flexible now than he actually was before the injury.”
Russ:
“Before, I’d bend over and spit my toothpaste in the sink, instead of squatting.”
Amy:
“He can almost touch his toes by himself now. It’s just the simple things. The simple things are what are so frustrating though.
Buttoning your own pants. You know?
Anything with little finger dexterity.
I downloaded a lot of toddler games that he could sit and play. And right now we’re trying to learn how to use his phone again.
I bought him a different phone because the screen is bigger.
He has a blurry line that goes across his field of vision. It changes. It’s called cortico-visual impairment, CVI.
Where’s your line at today Russ?”
Russ:
“I got one line that goes horizontal. Today it’s big and fat. Some days it’s real thin. Some days I have two lines.
I call it a squiggly line. It’s just blurry.
Since the accident, yeah.”
Amy:
“And it has gotten better. It has improved.
The eye doctor that we go to has one other patient with CVI that was an asthmatic patient. That patient is seven. Same kind of accident.
I haven’t done a whole lot of research on it actually.
The difference between Russ and a seven year old is that the younger you are, the more brain plasticity you have. When things like this happen to kids, they heal so much faster because their brains are still learning.
The older you get, the less plasticity you have.
The seven year old is actually back in school and she has a para but she’s doing good.
You don’t stop and think that, okay this doctor sees how many people, and there’s only two people out of her whole practice that have this. You know?
Most don’t make it. They just don’t.
It’s probably been the last couple of months that I’ve fully realized what a miracle he is.
God blesses us all the time.
Work has been really hard to do. I have a job where you’re supposed to be up and you’re supposed to be bubbly and sometimes you don’t necessarily want to be up and bubbly after you’ve been up half the night.”
Russ:
“They’ve been really good.”
Amy:
“Yeah, New York Life has been really good.
At work he won the Rockstar Award in June. They gave him a plaque.
It’s actually a new award. They made the award for people like Russ.
For Russ.
They didn’t have a Rockstar Award. They did all the rest of the awards for the day and then they just came and they said, “Hey, you know there’s one person here that’s had to re-learn how to do everything.”
There was not a dry eye in the house.
Because everybody at New York Life knows Russ.
We have the sixteenth floor downtown. Russ knows that he can stay on the sixteenth floor and he just wanders around and visits with whoever. (laughs)
Just the last couple of weeks we’ve started the transition for him to stay at home. Because I do need to work.
It’s time for me to focus again.
It’s time for Russ to take his own miracle on.
It’s time for him to be responsible for getting…I’ve done what I can do for him, you know?
It’s his turn.
If he chooses to lay in that bed all day every day, that’s his choice. I can’t fix that for him.
But I’ve gotten him as far as I can get him.”
Russ:
“Now it’s up to me.”
Amy:
“Considering there hasn’t been any services, we’ve done really well. We’ve not done PT, OT or speech since March.
We’ve just worked our butts off. And I’m mean to him.
“Come on old man, lets go.”
To be continued….
© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.
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We are Russ and Amy, and we live in Valley Center, Kansas.
In the midst of recovery from an anoxic brain injury, I AM Miracle Story #17.