The husband fell a while back and ended up with a small tear in his rotator cuff. They’ve done a couple of injections, he did physical therapy and the only thing that helped was the big steroid injection right into the joint. Except it only helped temporarily and that’s the kind of thing you cannot get too many of because if you do it will deteriorate your joint.
When he was in the hospital having his procedure a couple of weeks ago the anesthesiologist told me that when he put the husband under he had to loosen up his neck. For a day and a half afterwards husband had less pain so I think some of the pain is coming from him having a very stiff neck.
I brought him for a massage but he said that didn’t help. So I brought him to my new town chiropractor because sometimes she works massage into her sessions. When I take him out in public he tries to fake being normal. But some days he just can’t fake it. On those days he doesn’t want to leave the house. But.... when you’ve made the appointment days before you don’t know how you’ll be feeling. Well. On Tuesday, when his appointment was, he was feeling pretty bad and we went to the chiropractor. She could see him being as unsteady as he gets and me trying to help him. She whispered to me in the hallway “How do you do it?” And I told her that’s why I am always so stressed out.
I’m fond of saying “You know what every woman wants? VALIDATION” because obviously it is true for me and getting that validation gave me so much strength. I’m not kidding when I tell you that the worst thing anyone could say to me is how good he looks right after I’ve told them how much he is struggling.
He fell again yesterday morning. I heard the crash and I ran down the hall. I couldn’t help him because he fell in the bathroom and was lying right up against the door so I had to wait outside the bathroom and hope that he could get himself up on his own. Later in the day we discovered blood everywhere. It was in the shower it was on the bathroom floor of the hallway floor, on the bedroom floor and the bed. I examined his legs examined his butt I examined his back could not find where he was bleeding from. I recalled seeing a tiny cut on his toe after the fall and I had him take his sock off. Bingo. He had actually scraped the skin off of the top of his little toe and was bleeding heavily. His sock was drenched and his sneaker was drenched in blood. I tried to wash and bandage his foot but when I checked on it an hour later he had bled through another sock. Then I gathered some supplies and squeezed his toe for five minutes straight willing it to stop bleeding. My mind raced to think if we had anything to stop the bleeding. If I had something it would have been from when I feared clipping the dog’s nails too short. Would it be 10 years old? 15? Was it from two dogs ago? 20 years old? I could tell you exactly where it was in the old house but I didn’t even know if I had seen it since we moved. In the end I managed to stop the bleeding and re-bandage his toe tighter. I made him leave it elevated on the coffee table for an hour and a half and then re-examined it after he walked it to bed. I think I did the trick but I’m a little afraid of waking up and finding out it started to bleed again overnight.
I live with this fear of what I’ll find in the mornings.
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