The Most Dangerous Things on the Farm

It’s been almost two months since I wrote a blog post and I never did finish the story of our Colorado road trip. But there were extenuating circumstances and that’s what this post is about. I has taken me this long to be able to figure out accessing my photos and the blog part of my website. I hope that this is just the jump start to get me going again.

When you think about the most dangerous things on the farm there a number of things that could come to mind: runaway tractor? Mean rams?

How about this one?

Or this? Nope. This is not a poisonous snake. And the dog is pretty gentle too.

I want to include some fun photos before I go back to the scary stuff. Isn’t this a fabulous Jacob sweater? My friend, Kathleen spun yarn and knit the sweater especially to fit me and I was going to wear it o the big sheep and wool festival in Rhinebeck New York in the fall. We never made it there because f my injury. At least I have the sweater and I look forward to when I’ll be able to wear it.

This is a Learn to Weave class I taught at Fiber Circle Studio not long befoe the accident.

I guess I was going to write a blog post about breeding season. This is a new marker replacing on that was used up in the harness that the ram wears so you can monitor breeding progress.

Back to the scary stuff. This looks like just a regular stack of alfalfa with a few bales missing. But it’s not as innocent as it seems. It was a stack like this, although complete, that I fell off of in mid-Ocotber. Well, it was either the stack or the ladder that was leaning on it. We’ll never know because I don’t remember. I climbed up to throw a few bales down to feed and because I like to see the view from something tall (living in the flat land). These stack are 80 bales and each bale i 95-100 pounds. My husband found me on the ground unconcious. Unfortunately the stack was on concrete instead of soft mud or sand. I underwent surgery to remove part of my skull to reelease the pressure of the brain swelling. So this photo was taken after I was out of the hospital a month later. I was in a coma for 3-4 weeks at the hospital. The helmet if a snowboarding helmet that replaced the hospital-issued helmet that rubbed in a lot of places. I have a red cotton cap between my head and the helmet. This was to protect the half-grapefruit size hold in the skull where the skull piece had been removed. I douldn’t go anywhere/do anything without the helmet becuase the brain was not protected. In reality I couldn’t go anywhere/do anything anyway. That photo was on one of my few trips to the barn

Farm Club filled in a lot. After I came home they gathered a few times to do barn work and help in the shop.

It is wonderful having such a great group of people to support me.

Fast forward (slow forward ) to February 6. That was the day that the skull plate was to be put back in. First it had to get to the hospital. There are storage facilities for such things and I heard that my skull part was in Kentucky. Then I heard Virginia. We showed up at the hopsital after all the pre-op stuff on the morning of the 6th to find that my bone was on an airplane that was stuck in Georgia. So we came back the next day for surgery.

This attractive iimage was taken the following day I think. Those are ice bags under the net. I was in the hospital for only a few days and thankfully was allowed to go home early the next week.

Another view that show where they cut through the initial scar and lifted my scalp all the way up to slide the bone in. They anchored the bone with titatium plates and screws and then stapled the skin.

This is how it looks otday, 2 weeks after the second surgery. I go in tomorrow to get the staples out.

So this has been a long 4-1/2 months. I am much better after the second surgery than after the first and hopefully will get clearance to do a little more activity than I’ve had this whole time. i mean lambing starts in a day or two and it’s snot easy to think of siting in the house waiting for my husband or son to report in. I just don’t want to do it that way. But the next thing I have to overcome is a frozen shoulder. That is likely a result of being in a coma with no movement of the arm. It’s very hard to think that I could be released to walk aaround and get to the barn but that I can’t use my arm. Frozen shoulder is very painful and the only way to get over it is to tear up the adhesions in the shoulder joint—excercises which I’m trying to do but I think I need more guidance/PT support first.

Thanks for catching up with my blog. Maybe I’ll all least be able to keep up with this—although I can’t use my big camera very well rifht now and I can’t walk around among the sheep because I’m still working on balance issues.