Good News

Hello blog followers! I have missed writing this blog – missed mentally making note of our travels to share with you. I have a few blog posts left in me before we officially hang up our sabbatical. I plan to write the post everyone keeps asking about (which park was our favorite) and I may publish a post I wrote called “Cousin Eddie.” If you have seen Christmas Vacation you get the gist. Lastly I am planning to write a blog post on how to plan/take a sabbatical. I had several people contact me early in the trip – mostly through Linked In – to ask how we planned this. I owe them an answer on how to plan, budget, etc. If there are any other blog posts you think we need to submit before we resume our normal lives please let us know.

In the meantime, the world needs a little good news right now and I have three pieces to share.

First, I now know 4 people with Covid-19 and ALL of them are going to be ok. It’s reassuring amidst all of the doom and gloom to know that people we know and love can come through “it” relatively intact (although one friend told me he lost 20 pounds through the ordeal!).

Second, all of my friends in the medical community are also doing well. Those on the front lines – especially in ER’s – are completely exhausted but otherwise hanging in there.

Third, Ava’s knee is on the road to recovery! We had our 6 week x-ray taken in Austin, TX a few weeks ago and received the all clear to start putting weight on the leg. We also had our first (and thus far only) physical therapy appointment to get a PT regimen started. Our plan at the time, pre-Covid, was to do physical therapy on the road and then make another PT appointment somewhere near Miami during the Florida leg of our trip to check our progress and get an updated list of exercises. Covid derailed our plans and so we are making do like everyone else. Ava, self-disciplined beyond her years, has been faithful to her exercise regimen and successfully dropped both the crutches and her brace after about 3 weeks of tapering off of them. She is now able to bend her knee past 90 degrees, a key metric for stage two of recovery which involves riding a stationary bike. Since we are quarantined and couldn’t go to a local gym even if we wanted to, Dan MacGuyvered a solution using an old bike he found in my parent’s storage locker (speaking of MacGuyver, we have been watching old episodes with our kids – they are a hysterical artifact of the 80’s but I still think Richard Dean Anderson is dreamy…). Ava is now successfully riding the bike a few minutes each day regaining flexibility and muscle.

We were able to connect with her primary care physician in Charlotte and now have a tele-health PT appointment set up with a physical therapist who can guide our efforts in April and tide us over until we are able to see humans face to face later this spring. We also have a preliminary appointment set up with an orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte to monitor progress on the repair and evaluate if/when we take out some of the screws. One in particular is protruding from the patella. The head of the screw sits a little proud of the knee cap and you can feel (and see) it poking up. I can’t imagine how weird that must be for Ava – thank goodness she has never seen the movie Alien ;).

Our best wishes to all of you, stay safe. A few more blog posts yet to come.