He’s home – finally! 7 hospitals, 12 months, thousands of miles of travel and we finally got him home 4 days before the anniversary of his accident. Our lives have gotten even busier than before as we are now doing everything we were doing before, plus doing all the things the nurses and assistants did when he was at the different hospitals and facilities.
The good news is he’s home. No more nurses coming in to take his vitals every few hours, no one waking him up for medicines, room cleaning, food delivery or any of the other 100 reasons that were used for waking him up all the time. His dogs are with him, he has just started to have friends come over to hang out with him, and although all of these things have their downsides, overall I think Jesse is happier to be home than at a hospital.
The less than good news is that he came home to an unfinished house as the contractor doing the home renovations completely missed the deadline or should I say deadlines as we left Jesse in St Louis for an extra week to let them get their work done – then came home and found it was still far from done. Having to listen to construction workers in his house for the first three weeks he was home only contributed to his ongoing depression, so that has not lifted as a result of being home. He’s still in a lot of pain and with his spasms getting worse, his pain is higher than ever and that’s only made him more depressed than ever. Our primary goal is to get him out of pain and into a daily routine that keeps him busy, has him doing several hours of rehab whether at home or at out-patient rehab and has him enjoying a little bit of each day.
Despite the depressing picture described above, Jesse continues to fight and impress us everyday. When he’s not in excruciating pain, he will still make jokes, come up with interesting conversation and want to do more things with more people. He has started to let people visit with him and he’s really appreciated everyone who has visited him and just talked to him as they always would, not focusing on his injury or treating him special. The more “normal” we can make his “new normal” the better.
The battle is still uphill, but we’re hoping we can get to the top soon. Once we get him out of daily pain and stronger, we are looking to get him to some of the state-of-the-art treatment facilities in San Diego, Canada, Israel, Asia or Europe. There are exciting new developments and procedures for spinal cord injury with the promise of stem cells repairing his injured spine still several years away. We are going to do everything we can to get him any/every treatment he qualifies for to get him his hands and wrists back. It may take the next year or two, but nothing is more important to his quality of life than regaining control of his hands and to some extent his wrists as well.
Our lives are too busy (hence the long time between updates), too stressful and very focused. If you ever wondered about your life’s purpose, this type of challenge puts it all in perspective. We want to apologize to all our friends and relatives and supporters who we have been remiss in communicating with on a timely basis. There are days that you just don’t want to talk about the pain and struggles we’re witnessing Jesse go through and there are other days we’re we are just too busy to get to everything. Please understand that we greatly appreciate all of you and we wish we could communicate better with everyone on a daily basis. Thank you very much – from all 4 of us – for all of your support. We are going to continue to look for both financial and volunteer support as we explore these new treatment options for Jesse. Traveling out of the country as needed will not be cheap, but getting Jesse his hands back would be worth 10,000 times whatever it costs.
So thank you again, hope this helps get everyone up to date and I tried to paint an honest, but balanced picture of “where Jesse is at” both physically and mentally on a daily basis. Look for an upcoming fund raiser event announcement and I’ll continue to try to update the web site on a more timely basis. Thank you – we love and appreciate all of you – from Dave on behalf of Jesse, Kathy and Elliot