Mondays with Mike: Cracks everywhere

An “All fall down” update:

Cast and all, the girls are back at it.

Beth’s wrist was indeed broken by her fall. In two places. When against all hope the pain did not go away on the Monday after the tumble, we ended up in the ER on Tuesday morning, where doctors were fairly amazed that Beth had made it that long with just a couple ibuprofen. For the record, the docs at Rush were fantastic—asking detailed questions about whether she hit her head, and x-raying her bruised knees, which were, but for the bruising, just fine.

They put on a humongous cast that severely limited any motion in Beth’s right hand an arm. And we went home, pulled the blinds down in our bedroom and curled up in the fetal position for a couple hours.

Here’s the deal. Beth won’t say it but I will. Her life is made pretty complicated, difficult and sometimes tedious by her not being able to see. Add anything onto that, and it just sucks. It doesn’t do a lot for me, either. For a couple days, I had to tie her shoes, zip her coat, there was the bra thing, and, well.

We’ve gotten nothing but support and love from friends and family, and for that, we are grateful as always. (Zingerman’s care package! Cheese from Marche! Homemade meatloaf and fixins’ for an entire meal!) But some stuff, we just have to do ourselves as a practical matter. The worst part for me, frankly, is seeing Beth have to deal with this. But we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.

And now for the answer to the question that some have asked and others are afraid to ask: No, it wasn’t Luna’s fault.

Luna likes to go fast, really fast, and I think after walking at a snail’s pace with Whitney for months, Beth was thrilled by the pace. Kinda like going from a Ford Pinto to a Ferrari.

Still, Beth decided she needed to slow Luna down. So, before taking off on that ill-fated walk to the pool, Beth decided to use an apparatus the Seeing Eye had given her to use at home. It’s called a Gentle Leader, and it helps dog focus, it gives the human another way to give the dog feedback, and generally helps them work better alongside one another.

The Gentle Leader really worked. Luna and Beth were walking at a deliberately slow pace and the damaging fall was slow-motion. Thinking back, it was sort of like some snow skiing falls; sometimes the slow ones are the worst.

On the Thursday after the accident, we saw a specialist. They replaced the log on Beth’s arm with something still cumbersome but much more manageable. Also, no sling. So, there’s that. We’ll go back this Thursday, and if a new x-ray shows it’s healing properly, it’s a few more weeks in the cast. If not, outpatient surgery will ensue.

Beth and Luna have eased back into working together—for Beth, even though she’s right-handed, it actually would’ve been worst to break her left wrist—it would have meant she couldn’t work at all with Luna at a really important time. Beth taught her class last Wednesday. She’s teaching again this afternoon, and she and Luna are visiting a school Wednesday morning.

And Luna’s just fine. She is, in fact, at this early point in their union, better than any of Beth’s other dogs.

Me, I’ve become a version of Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good as it Gets. All I see are cracks and irregularities in the sidewalks. And there are a lot of ‘em.