Healing is Hard

I wrote my last post about Dad's funeral at the airport as I was waiting for a flight to St. Louis to be there for Matt and Erin and family after their car accident.  It was almost three weeks after the funeral and this post is almost three weeks after I got back. I am just a little slow.

Matt texted us on Saturday, February 13 to say they were OK but had been in an accident and were in an ambulance on the way to the ER to have Ian checked out. Along with the text he sent this picture:

They were going about 30 mph through a green light and the car on the right had a flashing yellow light. The driver was on his cell phone and got confused when the car behind him honked. He turned into Matt and Erin's Pilot, hitting them head on.

As soon as Ian got out of the Pilot he collapsed to the ground and said his stomach really hurt. The EMTs checked them all out and decided they needed take Ian to the ER and have him looked out. The next thing we heard was that they had decided to send Ian to the St. Louis Children's hospital and have him checked out there. The doctors thought they saw some fluid in Ian's belly on a CAT scan but they weren't sure, he was still in a lot of pain, was throwing up and started to run a fever. 

The doctors there decided to admit him and watch him overnight. By late the Sunday morning Ian's fever was higher, he was still throwing up and morphine wasn't helping the pain. The trauma pediatric surgeon told Erin he thought he needed to go in and take a look. He could do it lapriscopically and the best case scenario would be there would be nothing wrong, but he was worried there might be damage to an intestine.

Almost three hours later Matt called us and said that Ian was out of surgery. Of course we were waiting anxiously for news. I have to admit even though I knew Matt would let us know as soon as he heard something, I texted a few times for updates. The surgeon had to repair a hole in Ian's lower intestine and his colon was crushed up against his spine. The surgeon spent a lot of time making sure there were no holes in the colon as well. Thankfully there were not. Matt sent this picture of Ian in the recovery room.

Those are restraints on his arms so he couldn't pull out his nose tube and IV lines. 

I was ready to jump on a plane that afternoon, but Erin wanted her sister Cathy to come first and then I would come to help when Ian got out of the hospital. I waited until the next Saturday to come, but it was hard.

Ian was in the hospital for eight days making, what seemed at the time, slow progress as we realized how severely injured he was. They had to put a PIC line in to get him nutrients because he couldn't eat anything. He had to be sedated while they did this and for some reason this put us all on edge. While they were putting the PIC line in they found he also had a collapsed lung so pneumonia was a worry until he could get it re inflated. This required all kinds of respiratory therapy that was very painful to Ian's poor abused belly. It was harder that anything a nine year old should have to do.

I finally got there late Saturday night. As I worried, prayed and worried some more I needed something to do. Ian's favorite quilt was an old ratty whole cloth tied quilt that Mom and I made for Matt's bed when he was Ian's age. I refused to mend it any more the last time I was there. I had started a scrappy "Trip Around the World" quilt last year but didn't like the way it was going, so I put it away for while. After dad died I figured out how to fix it and worked on it as kind of therapy for myself. It was almost three quarters pieced when we got the news about the accident. To take my mind off of the worry I finished the quilt so Ian would have a new comfy cozy quilt to recuperate under. I decided to use fleece for the back so it would be soft against Ian's skin. I figured I had over 60 years of scraps in that quilt: vintage fabric from the 40s, fabric from mom's stash and from my own stash. I used Halloween, Christmas, Easter, baby, Charlie Brown, Hawaiian, and tons of florals and prints, at least 150 different fabrics. I called it "I Spy" because every time you looked you could find something different. This is the only picture I got of the quilt, but it says it all.