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Monday, December 2, 2019

My sister was run over (by her own truck)

[Getting run over isn't a pretty thing, I'm going to be talking about the aftermath.  This is your warning, read at your own risk.]

It happened on Tuesday, much of the information I've been given was third hand (I didn't go up to my sister in the emergency room and order her to regale me with the story of how she got there; I didn't do that in the ICU either), so it's possible some details are off (or missing) but I'll tell you what I know.

The daycare my sister's middle and youngest child attend is one of those smaller more personal affairs where it's run out of the provider's home.  That home is on a hill.  Maine, especially non-coastal Maine (after losing the farm, my sister's family moved inland), is cold in late November.  To keep the kids from freezing, my sister left the truck on (and thus the heat on) while she got them in.  The middle child, a three year old, knows how to unbuckle himself.

In what is, so far as I know, his first time shifting gears in his life, the three year old put the truck in neutral.  My sister's luck being what it is, she was down hill from it.

Whatever the exact logistics of being run over were, she ended up belly down.  She was taken, by helicopter, to a hospital, and was still in the emergency room when I arrived.  (In imaging at the exact time I got there.)

When I got to see her, her neck was in a brace which left her head pointed straight up, her hair was splayed out around her (it didn't move at all, for obvious reasons), she spoke only in whispers, sometimes you had to lean in to make out what she was saying (broken ribs made greater volume equate to greater pain), and there was dried blood on her teeth.

They came in at some point with a portable X-ray machine and took shots of her knees.  I never did learn what the results of those were.

At some other point, before the X-ray I think, someone (doctor? nurse?) told my mom and I that her spinal cord was intact and she had no nerve damage.  Her spine wasn't unharmed, but the harm was minor and on the outside of the vertebrae in question --I think it was the spinous process of each of the two vertabra in question-- thus safely far away from the spinal cord.

My sister added that the first thing she did after being run over was wiggle her toes, and she was so happy/relieved/[good thing] when she could feel them wiggle.

She coughed up bloody gunk.  The pain of coughing was very severe, she held my hand while she did it.  It wasn't the first time she'd done that, I was told.

This wasn't just lung gunk with blood in it, this was lung gunk that had merged with blood to the point that it was uniformly blood colored (no hint of the original lung gunk color) and was saturated enough that the blood color didn't look at all watered down or diluted in spite of the fact that lung gunk is not remotely blood colored.

They took her away to look into the goings on in her chest.  Then they sent her to the ICU.

My mom spent the night, my dad and I went home.

I got home at midnight, I think it was probably two AM before I even tried to sleep.  (I wasn't in the right state of mind for attempting sleep when I got home.)

The next day, there was a fair amount of confusion as to plans.  Also, I discovered a plumbing problem that prevented me from washing my clothes.  It ended up being the case that I came up to help out at my sister's house, without much in the way of clothes, later than the journey should have been undertaken (my dad was my ride, my dad and driving in the dark do not mix well at all.)

The hospital was on the way to my sister's house, so I got to stop in and see her that day too.  I haven't seen her since then.

She was out of the neck brace, which made her look so much more alive, but a new problem had surfaced alongside that.  Something is wrong with her jaw.  It could be as little as nerve damage to a single tooth, it could be something worse.  They told her they were going to look into what it was that morning.  (I don't know how to phrase that well, they told her that morning, yes, but the point is that what they told her was that they were going to look into it that same morning.)  It was dusk when she and I parted ways, they still hadn't done anything.

The thing with her jaw was important not just because it was (and, to my knowledge, still is) causing her severe pain.  (Worse than the broken ribs, which is saying something.)  It was causing her so much pain that she couldn't eat and neither could she cough.  The first is important because they weren't giving her nutrients any other way, just setting food that she couldn't eat in front of her in a sort of modern day torment of Tantalus.  The second because they told her that she should be coughing in order to get the bloody gunk out of her lungs.

Speaking of her lungs, they never told her what the results of that pre-ICU test were.  They said that if it had been bad enough to worry about she would have been sent to a specialized ward (I think it was cardiac, not pulmonary, because they were specifically looking at the blood vessels around her lungs, and the heart's right there in the near-center of that area.)  So they told her one thing that the results weren't, but they never told her what the results were.

When I left at dusk, they were moving her out of the ICU.

They have since moved her back.

I've been at her house, which is not the hospital, since that night, so that's the most recent time I've seen her.  She's going to need to be able to live out of a single floor, which means moving her bedroom and cleaning up a bathroom that's currently being used as a night-time dog kennel.  Most of what I've done house-related here is tied up in that.  We're clearing out a storage room on the first floor to be her bedroom.  It's a storage room.  It has a lot of stuff in it.

There's also the matter of her kids.

The daycare provider watched the younger two for a good long while, meanwhile her oldest was scheduled to visit the other side of his family (he has a different father than the younger two) for Thanksgiving and that's what he did.

Her housemate has a three year old of her own.  If I understand correctly, this is a time that was specifically set aside for housemate to spend with her daughter, away from said daughter's father and current significant other, sort of like the way my sister's eldest was spending Thanksgiving exclusively with the other side of his family and away from us.  (But not the same, it must be said.  His father is deceased, so it was with his uncle and other grandparents, while this child is staying with one of her parents and no other relatives.)

As of Sunday night, this house has a two year old, two three year olds, and a six year old.  It is a headache incarnate, full of noise and motion and . . . "signifying nothing" is the only way I can think of to end that sentence.

(Wednesday had the six year old because his departure had been delayed, another day had the other two, and housemate's kid has been here non-stop, but until Sunday night we hadn't had to deal with all four kids all at once.)

And that's where things stand.

I'm far from home, trying to help out at my sister's house.  She's far from home, though not as far, in a hospital.  I don't know her prognosis.  I don't know if she has a prognosis yet.

Everything is a mess.


The licence plate on my sister's truck is UNIQRN.  (She came up with that herself.)

She would like the world to know that she was run over by a unicorn.

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