Well, this week we have had several adventures! I love adventures, they teach you new things. This week our first adventure was called Isaias. Not our first tropical storm, but it threw us some new twists and taught us cool things such as:
How to build a dam out of an inflatable kids pool.
How to keep water from continuing to flow into a basement during a storm.
What happens when your shop vac filter is clogged while trying to clean water up in your basement.
How to clean your lawn with a push broom.
We also sharpened our water diverting ditch digging skills, and confirmed that the builder of our house had no idea what they were doing. (This has actually been confirmed about 100 times now, not that I’m counting)
The good news is that Shannon enjoyed a waterfront view without leaving her bed or opening any curtains. She almost had an indoor pool, but we couldn’t afford that AND a dry place to live, so we opted for the dry place to live.
Other adventures:
See that white pipe sticking out of the grass? That’s our well.
We love not paying a water bill, but sometimes we pay for it anyway. Like when the power goes out. We have a generator so we got it up and running again, but it turned into a silt vacuum cleaner and filled our pipes with sandy grimy sludge. Mostly it effected the toilets which are all now sporting new tank inner mechanism (which I’m sure have a real name). Lancer learned how to clean sand out of all the pipes to the toilets as well. I’m sure he’s wanted to learn that.
The washing machine also got hit with the silt virus. It’s now quarantined until late next week.
Have I mentioned that we do two to three loads of laundry a day just for Shannon? And we have 5 other people living here. So having a sick washer is not fun.
We also learned the laundromat near us has rust in their water. And now all of our white towels are orangish. :(
K learned how to help Shannon transfer this week! No one died. But they may have been injured. I say may, because Shannon can’t feel if she’s getting banged up. No limbs fell off, in case you were wondering. The exciting part of this news is that Shannon is STRONG enough to be able to have K help! She’s getting stronger every day.
Shannon’s been practicing wheelies in therapy. She’s getting rather good at them, or so I’m told. We aren’t allowed to go with her to therapy (covid) so we haven’t seen her in action! You have to take the anti-tippers off the wheelchair to do wheelies and she’s not ready for doing it without her therapists and their contraption they use to keep her from landing on her back.
She’s also nailing it with her transfers. She does so much of them on her own. I hadn’t transferred her out of the car in several days and almost tossed her on her face ‘helping’ her. It wasn’t as helpful as I thought. Luckily, she caught herself on the door.
You might remember long ago I mentioned Shannon named her feet/legs. Left is Shawn, right is Gus (Psych- the series). Well, in case you are interested in updates on their lives: Gus is still a major pain and doesn’t cooperate much. He stays behind when Shannon tries to move him from the chair to another place, refuses to wear compression socks - literally fights it; and has separation anxiety from Shawn.
Shawn twitches a more than Gus, and is relatively stiff most of the time and also suffers from separation anxiety. They usually stick together at the knee and it’s a true wrestle to separate them, most of the time requiring two people! We do a lot of stretches with them and are looking forward to having them get back on the stim bike so they can have some electrical stimulation to get them whipped back into shape and behaving better. Hopefully Shannon’s PT will do that soon.
Otherwise, we are still here, still making progress, still taking one day at a time.
We love that you are still here too! Please continue the prayers, we are still feeling them! Pray for Shannon to improve her core strength, for her spinal cord to continue healing, and to have the overall strength and stamina she needs for her therapy.
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