My weekends are almost as hectic as my weekdays.  Maybe more so.  Appointments with nurses, children to exercise, meals to cook, dogs to herd, medical supplies to buy.  My mother has been instructed firmly by her own physical therapist to stay off her foot as much as possible.  I have to insist that she sit down and not cook the chicken herself, not move the chairs herself, not do the laundry herself.

This is the first weekend with Ellen home.  There is a lot to adjust to.  I hope that with some effort we can settle into routines that work for everyone over the coming weeks.  I have only had time to help Ellen with her PT a couple of times since she came home on Friday, and am worrying a lot about it.  I know that a day or two won't make a lot of difference, but I know the importance of establishing healthy, consistent routines, and the difficulty of breaking a bad pattern and developing a good one.  When we do get to work on her PT she has been insistent about doing all of her exercises as completely as possible, so that's encouraging.

Every night I am exhausted, but it's not the fine clean kind of exhaustion that comes from working your body hard, that leaves you light and relaxed at the end of the day.  It's a bitter, cold exhaustion that comes from holding yourself very tightly in a small space for a long period of time, a kind of rictus of worry.  My days spin with mad activity, but it all still leaves me frustrated.

My parents have a swimming pool.  (I can't believe how lucky we are, to live near my parents who have their own swimming pool.  The boys have been spending about one hour out of every three in the water.)  Swimming in it reminds me of the difference between swimming in a pool and swimming in a lake.  In the lake you can swim, and swim, and swim as long and far at a stretch as you like before turning around.  In the pool, you reach the edge and have to turn around after only a few strokes.  As lovely as it is, it feels perversely cramped, confining compared with the limitless freedom of the lake.  All the time, it's bumping up against the edges, turning, turning, turning, turning, turning.

After drafting a long-winded and vague description of what we need help with, I finally took pheromone's advice and set up a web site to coordinate these tasks.  Thanks to Erik H. for suggesting lotsahelpinghands.com, which appears to be tailored to exactly this kind of activity.

If you have time and opportunity to come help, let me know and I'll send you an invitation to the lotsahelpinghands.com community that I set up for this. (The URL is http://www.lotsahelpinghands.com/c/11181/ but it appears that I've got to invite you before you can sign into it.) I've created open tasks for the things that we need most right away (childcare and meals).  I'll add other tasks, like helping me organize the house, as soon as I figure out how to explain to people what needs to be done. :-)

It feels incredibly hard for me to ask for help.  Thank you all for making it possible for me.

I am amused beyond all reason that the responses to my last post were split somewhere between "glad that Ellen is doing better" and "Ooh! Llamas!"

You guys are the rockingest.

Ten stitches, if I'm counting correctly.

Short synopsis: if you've ever tried to diagnose a server failure by talking to someone reading error logs to you over the phone, on a dying cell phone battery, while driving at rush hour on a city expressway to visit your spouse who's in the hospital --

-- I don't recommend it.  Really.  Not at all.

So, on Thursday evening at around 6:30, Ellen lost control of her van and hit a tree at about 45mph. She broke a clavicle and fractured her ankle badly enough to require reconstructive surgery. The surgery took place early this morning and went well, but there is a possibility of long-term bone damage and nerve damage.

At this hour she is recovering in Mass General Hospital in Boston. She will be there for at least the next 3-4 days and, while she's still in a great deal of pain, she would welcome visitors. She's in Ellison 612A -- she has her cell phone with her, and I will find out the phone number for the room as soon as I can.

The long-term recovery prospects will be challenging, to say the least. The surgeon told me this morning that at the very very best she can expect three months in a cast with no weight on her right leg whatsoever, and  docorion  confirmed my guess that the realistic outlook is more like six months. In the meantime, with a broken collarbone, it doesn't seem as though she's going to be able to use crutches either. I'm sure the medical staff will help us figure out a solution, but we're kind of bewildered at the moment.

More as it happens. Ellen does not have Internet access in MGH, so if you have trouble reaching her on her cell please feel free to contact Tim.