APEX —
(Part Four)
I was in the best physical condition of my life during the time of Aaron’s recovery from surgery. He was wheelchair bound for the first four weeks. That meant that he had to be lifted into and out of the chair numerous times a day. Believe me, even though he was only 65 pounds in weight, those two leg-length casts added a lot of extra weight.
His only bad night was his first night home. They had given us an elixir of morphine to give him at bedtime. I learned later that the dosage was twice that for an adult. This was because bone pain is supposed to be the worst pain one can experience. And he had eight bone breaks to deal with. Less than an hour after he had fallen asleep beside his mom, he suddenly let out a long groan that grew in intensity. Without warning, he rolled over on his belly and then pushing out with his arms, stood straight up. We panicked and got him back down quickly. He was perspiring profusely and moaning. After wiping his face with a cool, damp cloth, he began to come around. I was on the phone with the hospital by then. The doctor was contacted and advised we not give him any more of the morphine and to bring him to the clinic in the morning.
I went back into the bedroom to see how he was doing. He seemed okay as we talked with him. Once we realized he was fine and was ready to try to get some sleep, he said one thing that confused us. “I’m glad you’re not blue monkeys anymore”. Morphine is one powerful drug. He was hallucinating, we thought. His mom figured it out pretty quickly though. “Surgical masks! They were blue!” she said. “We were the blue monkeys!”
He continued to heal nicely. Remarkably, the only pain reliever he ever took was Tylenol. After four weeks, he was to be fitted with ‘walking casts’. But first, the surgical pins had to come out. They took Aaron back to the cast room and sawed the casts in half, lengthwise, on the front and back. Then the outer part of each cast was pulled away, bringing the four pins in each leg out with it. There was no bleeding. No complaints of pain or discomfort. “It really feels…weird,” was all that Aaron said. The walking casts were put on and he was given a walker and sent home.
Once home, he insisted on walking up the front walk, up the ramp that I had built for the wheelchair, and into the house without any help. He paused a few times to “catch my breath” but made it without any assistance other than me opening the door for him. After sitting down inside and resting for a short time, he announced he had to go to the bathroom. Automatically, I offered to help him. Again he insisted on doing it on his own.
I waited in the next room, listening carefully in case he did need some assistance. I heard the bathroom door open. The house then began to move under my feet. The floor was shaking, knick-knacks on the coffee table were rattling. “Thump, thump, thump,” came the rapidly approaching sound and the shaking. Aaron rounded the corner into the den almost in a run, with a grin that went from ear to ear – without his walker. He was moving on pure inertia until he reached the sofa. He stopped with a bump against the cushions and burst out into laughter. My shock at his mobility display turned to laughter as well. He was determined he was going to walk again, and by golly, he did!
He spent four more weeks in walking casts, rarely using the walker. From then on, he was as active as any ‘normal’ boy could be. Having been grounded in a wheelchair and casts for that long simply seemed to drive him to never stay still for very long.
Now that his legs are nice and straight and strong, we had to face one huge reality check. We now had to raise a dwarf son into adulthood.
And we didn’t have an instruction manual.
(Note: from Part One, each chapter has a link to the following chapter)
(part five will be posted late tomorrow, as I'm on the road most of the day. 9:00 pm or so)
