Still in ICU, But Out of the Woods

Thank you all so much for your prayers and good wishes. I know how much they helped me; Walter's been passing them along to his family out there too, and they appreciate it. It's way past my bedtime, but I wanted to give you a brief update before I hit the sack.

Carl's been upgraded from critical. That's big. He's still in ICU and very heavily sedated. They're going to keep him semi-comatose for a few more days. But he's out of the woods, they say; they don't foresee any big setbacks.

Walter heard some more about the accident. Carl was driving a little tin-can type car made in Slovakia, where they all live. The car that hit him? It was a big ol' hunk of SUV.

So the reason he was broken so badly wasn't just from his car door pushing into him and cracking up on the lamppost. The SUV's grill was up so high, the vehicle itself whammed into the man through his window. Thus the devastating fractures in his shoulder and ribs.

His wife, Anne, Walter's oldest daughter, took one look at their car and never wants to see it again. Seeing the door pushed all the way past the gear shift was as much as she could handle.

Carl's total recovery time will be 6-8 months. There will be lots of physical therapy, of course, especially for his shoulder. He'll probably lose about 20% of its function.

Walter tells me it was separated, rather than simply dislocated. I didn't know there was a difference. Apparently, a simple dislocation means they just pop it back in. When it's separated, it tears up all the ligaments and tendons and cartilage and muscle tissue as it's wrenched way far out. That needs surgery, sometimes a series of surgeries, to repair.

In our family, we tend to get shoulder surgery; we have hereditary problems with impingement on the shoulder tendon. It's similar to rotator cuff surgery. Walter had this done too, from an injury.

The PT lasts forever, and it's brutal. But if you don't do it, the scar tissue builds and ruins all the work the surgeons did. So we all really feel for the man on this - it sounds like he has 100 times the damage we're used to seeing, in our own mundane shoulder problems.

Anne's doing much better now. She's back to her usual calm and efficient self...or as much as anyone could be, I guess.

I'll keep you up to date. I didn't want to leave you hanging. Reading other blogs, I know how maddening that can be.

He really will be fine. I'm still a little shook up, thinking about it all, but overall, I'm just so relieved. That little Ex-Step-Grandson will have his daddy at home with him for a while.

Somehow, even knowing how much pain Carl will be in, and how immobilized he'll be - I have this feeling that Carl and little Walter will be very good for each other as he recovers.