A Three Year Anniversary

When you live in the flat land it is nice to climb up high and get a view of the surroundings. This is a panorama view of our property from the top of an 80-bale haystack.

You also have to get on top of the haystack to throw bales down to feed. Here is another photo looking down—that’s Rusty below. That is the last photo I took on October 14, 2019. I have no idea how I fell off, but my husband found me on the cement below in a coma.

I’m almost embarrassed to show these next photos, because I look so terrible, but those of you who follow this blog know it’s about real life, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week. I keep seeing posts on social media about the Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, NY that was this weekend, and my friends and I were supposed to be there in 2019. We had airline tickets and a place to stay. Then this happened and they all stayed home.

This is the next picture that shows up on my phone, taken November 13 at the Kaiser Rehab Center in Vallejo. A big piece of skull had been removed from my head, so I had to wear that charming helmet (later replaced with my son’s snowboarding helmet). I also had a fracture of T-7/T-8 so had to wear that wonderful brace.

This was taken November 16 when I finally came home.

This was taken November 29. Trying to get into the holiday spirit? What is significant about this photo is that blanket and the paper with the yarns attached. My good friend, Mary, warped her loom and invited a lot of Farm Club and other friends to come to her house and weave their choice of yarns to create a blanket for me.

I still have this card on my wall with the yarn descriptions and all the friends who participated.

And of course I have the blanket—that is a very special gift.

I found this photo from January 8—it looks as though the brace is gone but my husband said I was still wearing it most of the time. I’m wearing the snowboarding helmet because there was only my skin over the big hole in my head. By the way, that would not be the same haystack but it does show how tall they are. I know other people who have fallen from haystacks—one landed on his feet I guess because he broke both ankles. Another suffered multiple broken bones and some internal injuries and had a long recovery.

This was taken later that month—same pjs, different shoes.

There is a lot that I have forgotten, or never knew, about that whole episode. I do remember that it took a long time before we could finally schedule the surgery (“elective”) to replace the part of the skull that was removed. We had a date for about February 7. We showed up for the surgery and were told that the skull piece was on a plane that had broken down in Atlanta. Who knew that body parts are stored somewhere on the East Coast? Fortunately it arrived the next day and I had the surgery. This is with ice packs on my head.

This gives you an indication of how much of the skull was removed. The stitches are where the skin flap was sewn back together. After the surgery recovery was much faster. It seems that when the skull is in place the pressure in the brain is more normal … Or something like that.

Things for which I am thankful:
This was pre-pandemic. The pandemic officially started a week or two later. Thank goodness all this hospital time and my “elective” surgery was before that.
My husband had retired a year or two before this. He didn’t have to try and juggle a stressful job with the stress of this accident and he was there to do what was needed. (And thank goodness he retired before the era of teaching on Zoom.)
Family and friends. The original prognosis was guarded—would I come home? Would I walk again? Would there be permanent brain injury? Some close friends were great support for my family as they navigated the uncertainty. As it eventually became evident that recovery was possible, friends helped keep the sheep and shop part of life on track—organizing holiday sales, sheep shearing, etc. There is still so much I don’t remember, but when I think about it I know that everything stayed on track and someone besides me took care of all that.

This may be a strange photo to end this post, but I didn’t take one yesterday when we did our annual Foxy’s Fall bike ride. I took this photo on the tandem as we did a brief ride to make sure the brakes and gears all worked. We got this tandem in 1986 when we got married. Yesterday we rode the metric century which is 62 miles through Solano and Yolo Counties. That seems a suitable way to acknowledge the three year anniversary of this life-changing event.

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.