Managing The Basics

Jessica is continuing to improve every hour. She can now open both eyes, shrug her shoulders, and nod her head. She has at least two more imminent surgeries, one to rebuild her eye socket and another to rebuild her knee. There really is nothing left of either the eye socket or the knee, so the surgeries will be a challenge, but if miracles can happen they will happen at UVA.

UVA is to trauma care what ABBHH is to mental health. I cannot speak highly enough of either one.

We are estimating that by the time Jessica is discharged from UVA her medical bill from the hospital will be in excess of $750,000. Jessica is uninsured. We are continuing to meet with the social worker and she put us in touch with a woman from the financial office. We outlined Jessica’s financial situation and the woman gave us news we could not have imagined. Once we provide the hospital with the necessary documentation of Jessica’s income and assets, UVA’s charitable foundation will cover 80% of the bill.

I’m already composing another blog entry about the need for universal access to health care.

Family Night is tomorrow, Friday July 25, at Basagic’s Funeral Home from 6pm until 8pm.

The funeral is Satruday, July 26, at Basagic’s Funeral Home at 11am.

Internment will immediately follow the service and will be at the family cemetery on the Keiter Farm in Mozer.

Dinner will be served at the South Mill Creek Church of the Bretheren.

If you cannot join with us in person, we humbly request that you join with us in prayer.

What a day.

The hardest part of today wasn’t picking out a casket for Clay. It wasn’t looking through old photos to make a memory board. It wasn’t holding Bev as she sobbed. It wasn’t comforting my grieving husband. Those things were easy.

The hard part of today is wrapped in a plastic bag hidden in my bra drawer. It is a short sleeve pull over shirt with a collar. It was Clay’s favorite shirt. He was wearing it when he died and it somehow got left in the truck after they removed his body. Jonny Smith towed the truck, found the shirt, and somehow — I have no idea how — it made it’s way in a plastic bag to Falon. She wants to keep it.

I made her give me the bag and wouldn’t let her open it. I did look at the shirt, privately, and it isn’t pretty, but it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I think Clay’s injuries were mostly internal, so there wasn’t a whole lot of external blood loss. I now have the job of washing the shirt and making it presentable. I’m going to wash it and then I’m going to cut off the parts that are just too gruesome to be seen.

I wish Falon would just let me burn it in the wood stove. It was his favorite shirt, though, and he wore it all the time. It actually still smells like him. I know his scent will disappear after I wash it, so I’m planning on spraying it with his cologne before I give it back to Falon.

Thinking about taking care of the shirt makes me feel dizzy and sick, but I’m honored that Falon would entrust me with the job of saving it, and I know that if I was in her position, I would want someone to do this for me.

Jessica is going to have to fight long and hard to recover. It may very well be the most challenging thing she will face in her life.

It is not fair of me to expect more of her than I am willing to do myself.

The doctors tell us she can hear us, so I told her last night that since I expect her to make a full recovery I am going to work just as hard for a full recovery myself. If Jessica is going to work as hard as she can to get better, I need to do the same thing as a show of solidarity.

Here’s to a new chapter in the battle against ED.

Quick update:

Jessica is stable and doing as well as can be expected. She will remain in the ICU for the foreseeable future, but she is now able to wiggle her toes and squeeze your fingers on demand. When we talk to her about Joe and Cy she tries to open her eyes and starts moving around. She wants to get better for her babies.

We are going to the funeral home in an hour to make the final arrangements for Clay.

Rather than flowers, we ask that you consider contributing to the trust fund we are setting up for Falon and Aubree. We need to do everything within our power to get Falon through nursing school so she can support Aubree as a single mom.

We love you and appreciate your support so much. For the next few days we request that you keep us in your prayers and if you feel the need to do anything else, please write down some special memories you have with Clay and given them to Beverly. Right now we have more food than we have room for, but this is going to be a long haul with Jessica, so if you feel lead to provide us with food, we hope you will consider doing so next week or the week after that. I can’t even begin to explain how much food we have right now. I’m sure it’s in the hundreds of millions of calories

The fact that we are such a close knit family is what makes losing Clay so much harder.

However, the fact that we are such a close knit family is what is going to allow us to heal. We will help each other do what cannot be done alone.

The last 24 hours have been surreal.

My husband’s brother, Clay, and my husband’s sister, Jessica, as well as Jessica’s husband, Chris, were in an unbelievable single vehicle accident last night.

Chris was banged up and bruised.

Both of Jessica’s femurs were shattered.  Her right eye socket was destroyed and her face is basically unrecognizable. The good news is that after two helicopter rides and a five hour long operation, she is going to survive. She is facing countless other surgeries before she is finally released, but everything now is headed in the right direction and the attending physician was confident enough in her condition to send me and my father-in-law home for a few hours so that we can begin to address other issues privately.

Gabe’s brother, Clay, suffered grievous trauma in the accident and died at the scene. He leaves behind his partner of five years, Falon, and their two year old daughter, Aubree Layne.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually be able to comprehend the fact that Clay is gone. Today we were so terrified about Jessica’s condition that that was our sole focus. Right now I am completely overcome with emotion about Jessica, but I am having a hard time feeling anything about Clay, and I think that must be because it doesn’t seem real yet.

The next time I start letting myself wallow in depression about some trivial food related hangup, I am going to take a deep breath, close my eyes, count to ten, and remind myself of what really matters in life. Today has reminded me about what our time here on earth is about: loving each other as Christ loves us.

Hug your children extra tight when you tuck them into bed at night and remember to thank God for being given the privilege to have had another day with them.

First, and foremost: there is to be no blame. Poor decisions were made by multiple people last night and it could have just as easily have been Clay driving. Please do not make this heartbreaking time any harder than it has to be by placing blame. We need to stand united as a community of family and friends, or else we are all going to fall apart.

Thank you for your AMAZING out pouring of love and support over the last 24 hours. It means a lot to me, so I know it must mean the world to Bev and Barry. If you called today and we haven’t yet returned your call please know that it isn’t a snub, we’re just being torn in a million directions. Funeral arrangements for Clay have not yet been made. Dave is coordinating things for us, so if you can’t reach us, feel free to call Basagic’s Funeral Home and ask Lori for the details because she’ll have as much information as we do, and it will be easier to get in touch with her anyway. I will also post the plans on Facebook once they are finalized.

After a very scary morning/afternoon, Jessica is out of danger, out of surgery, and has almost stable vital signs. She’s on one-to-one right now, so she has the undivided care and attention of a nurse at all times in the ICU. The ICU staff were wonderful to us tonight. As soon as Jessica got on the unit from the OR they let ALL of us in to her room to see her. I won’t lie. She looks like a truck rolled over her, which it did, which isn’t pretty. We’re talking months at UVA, but the important thing is that she is going to be ok. It will be a long road, but she is going to come home to us healthy and healed.

After being in Charlottesville all day I am home now, but I will be headed back to Charlottesville in a few hours after I try to take a nap. I’m going to try my best to keep blogging so that 1) I can keep everyone up-to-date and 2) so that I have a place to vent.

The last time I checked there were over 20 messages on my phone. I will check them and return the calls as soon as I can.

The kids are fine. Falon took Aubree to her mom’s house and Rick and Angie have the boys. Aubree keeps asking for her daddy. Joe and Cy know that their mommy has been in an accident, but they do not yet know that Uncle Clay has passed away. I don’t think any of us have figured out how to explain that.

Please keep praying. Thank you for loving us.

In Charlottesville today I saw a teenage girl that was unquestioningly anorexic. She was emaciated. For the life of me I couldn’t fathom how her parents could not see that she was acutely sick. (Or maybe they do know she’s sick and their re-feeding at home, but either way she was so ill that she had no business being out and about burning calories walking around Barnes and Noble.)

Even though I was saddened to see her so obviously in the grips of anorexia, I’m proud that my immediate reaction was, “That girl belongs in 2East on tubed and on re-feeding protocol.” I think if I had seen her even a couple of months ago, my first thought would have been very different. More along the lines of, “if she can look like that, what can’t I look like that?”

And before you accuse me of jumping to conclusions and assuming she’s anorectic rather than say, fighting cancer, let me tell you this: I saw her at the Starbuck’s cafe at Barnes and Nobel as I was drinking coffee and reading my new book. I heard her order, and I saw how she acted at the table with her friends around food. Classic eating disorder behavior. Classic. When you’ve been in treatment as long as I have, you know it when you see it, because you’ve pulled all the “tricks,” too.

Rough day. Blahhhhhh.

I told Dr. S he was obnoxious. He was killer hard on my today and kept trying to make me talk about things I really didn’t want to talk about. I held my ground and didn’t talk about it, but now I’m wondering if I didn’t cut off my nose to spite my face. He and Mrs. Dr. S are going on vacation so it will be two weeks before I see him again. Now I have to sit with this mess for two weeks when I should have just opened up and talked to him about it today. Instead of talking about why I’m feeling so bad, I spent the whole hour talking about how bad I felt and that I just want to go to sleep and never wake up. That’s great and everything to be open about my feelings, but it probably would have been more helpful if I had actually told Dr. S why I felt the way I did. But instead I sabotaged myself once again.

E won’t be back from Rhode Island until next week, so I had to see her colleague, L, today. L does not work with ED patients, and it shows. She’s a nice lady, don’t get me wrong, but she is clueless about how to work with eating disorders. I start crying each time I meet with her and she automatically starts crying, too. Empathy is nice and everything, but what I really need is a kick in the butt. E lets me cry, and she’ll hold my hand and give me a hug, but she doesn’t let me wallow in my tears. She tells it to me like it is and doesn’t let me manipulate her.

Tomorrow starts my work week. Friday was an incredibly difficult day. We had a rather serious incident at the clinic, and it wasn’t resolved by the time we all went home. I’m hoping it was taken care of today (the medical side is open Monday – Friday, it’s just us on dental that are open Tues-Friday), otherwise it is going to great me first thing tomorrow, and I don’t think I can handle it. I’ll explain the whole thing tomorrow, once the saga is over and done with so I can tell you the whole story: beginning, middle, and end.

I did manage to go grocery shopping today, and I bought a bunch of yummy stuff for my lunches this week. Breakfast is relatively easy for me because I’m hungry after not eating since the previous day and because for some reason I think my breakfast choices (cottage cheese and mandarins) are “safe foods.” Dinner is hard, but G is there to eat with me, so I usually do a pretty good job. It’s lunch where I am most likely to fudge around with my meal plan. If I think I may binge/purge on the way home from work I often don’t eat lunch at all. Plus I get overwhelmed trying to figure out what to eat and in what amount. E has been after me for a long time to buy vegetarian, organic frozen meals and take them to work with me for lunch. They are quick and require no thought/decision making to prepare. I know exactly how many calories I’m getting so I can a) not worry about the fact that I may be eating too much, and b) I can’t “accidentally” overestimate the caloric value to trick me into thinking I’m eating more than I am. Plus they are rather healthy.  I finally followed her advice today. I got enough meals for a week and I think I can handle taking one to work each day and eating the whole thing. No excuses.

Totally bizzaro thing happened today: there is an amazing Chinese restaurant in Harrisonburg. (Hard to believe, I know, but Harrisonburg actually has a bunch of high quality ethnic restaurants: Thai, Chinese, Ethiopian, Salvadoran, Italian, Greek.) You can eat there, but most of their business is carry out. G loves their food, so I thought I’d surprise him by bringing home some take out for him to have for dinner. Get this — the restaurant was closed. Not closed for the day or for the evening, but closed…. until the semester starts! How crazy is that that a Chinese restaurant “takes off” for summer break, too?!?!

Tomorrow I will wake up and today will be a memory. One day at a time. Today’s struggles won’t matter and God will bless me with a clean slate. One day at a time. I can handle tomorrow. I am not going to worry about anything else. I just need to make it through tomorrow. I can do anything with God’s help. (And your prayers don’t hurt, either! Thank you to all my readers who faithfully lift me up to the Lord in prayer. I do not think there are words that can adequately express my gratefulness to you.)