Is My Cape Fluttering

It's Sunday morning and while the nursing care has developed a life and pattern all its own, the emotions surrounding "the accident" are swirling with with their own energy.

The most important thing is that K3 continues to heal. She not only had yogurt yesterday, but homemade chicken broth and ice cream for dinner. Her pain is very manageable on her meds and we're making progress in getting her mouth to open a little further.

We are not showing her mouth in pictures. Not because it's horrible or disfigured. Its not. The surgeon did a good job sewing up her lip and the ice helped to bring the swelling down. 99% of the damage is inside her mouth so even if you saw her face, you wouldn't be shocked. However, I feel strongly that showing it should be up to K3. I take her picture for updates so you can see her strong spirit. Its up to her determine if she wants to reveal anything else.

Emotionally, we're all going through the process. K3 is struggling a bit with her sudden "celebrity". She's used to being in the background and not being noticed so much. So having the spotlight has been a bit of a burden. She feels like she has to respond to everyone and I'm coaching her that she does not have talk to everyone that calls or answer their questions about what happened.

For the family, its a little hard to respond to callers at times, at least for me. Many of them have emotionally charged responses to what happened. It is automatically assumed that whoever hit her is an asshole or a dirt bag and they feel vengeful and want to make sure we're "going after them."

We're not quite there. We don't know what happened and so we don't really have anger. We haven't asked K3 really because she felt so guilty initially for being hit. She thought we would be disappointed in her for not being safe. She says she was careful. So our questions to her are "how is your pain" and "do you need anything" and "are you ready for more ointment". We don't question her about the accident because it doesn't matter.

We haven't seen the police report, we don't even know which city responded. But I think I'm at the point where I'm ready to know what happened. Not because I want to be angry or vengeful, but because I want to know how to help K3 deal. If it wasn't her fault, she needs to know that. If it was, we need to help her come up with a plan for being safer.

And lastly, she's received a lot of praise for being brave. And she has been. But I'm working with her on not always having to be. She's got a lot of tough stuff headed her way as they put her mouth back together and people should understand if she's not always brave about it. She doesn't have to buy approval with bravery.

Not to leave TOG out... he's sick as twenty dogs. Swine flu is kicking his behind. I'm grateful that he's spending 99% of his time upstairs in his office. None of us want to see K3 get sick on top of everything else.

Off to get cleaned up and go back to the pharmacy for more drugs. I think they're going to give me a punch card... buy 5 prescriptions, get the 6th one free. Sick humor.

Gosh I'm tired.

AG out.