life trumps blogging

When you get a phone call at 11:00 on a Thursday morning, telling you your son fell off a roof at work, you put your life (including your blog and twitter) on hold for as long as necessary. That was the situation here a week ago, July 30th.

Another call a few minutes later told us which hospital the ambulance had taken him to. When we arrived at Emergency and informed the nurse who we were, it was not a good sign that she hustled us into a "Family Room" with a social worker and the promise that a doctor would be in to see us shortly. So began a saga which is ongoing.

Our 23-year-old son fell about 20 feet onto concrete that morning. His right wrist and the left side of his face and head took the main brunt of the fall. In the intervening days the orthopedic doctor has plated and screwed his wrist together, the plastic surgeon has pushed his cheek bone back into place, and we're waiting for his puffy left eye to open to find out if he can still see out of it.

But it could have been so much worse. He could, of course, be dead, or paralyzed, or brain damaged. As it is, he can walk and use his arms (no neck or back injury apparently), and his memory - despite a concussion - is as good as ever. Except he can't remember the fall or the time immediately before it. And since his buddies on the job didn't see him fall, nobody knows exactly what happened - or even if he actually fell from the roof or from a ladder...

He was discharged from hospital yesterday and is staying with us for the next while. I am getting practice being a nurse and expanding my repertoire of soft food cooking since he isn't supposed to chew due to the healing bones in his cheek.

If you are a pray-er, please pray that his sight will return, and that this accident will work out for good in his life.