A Beautiful Day

After a week where Barbara continues to make great strides in rehab, it has been quite a blessed weekend.

Jackie and Peter are here visiting for the weekend, which will include a small belated wedding celebration among the folks here at GFM. We went over to Merrillville to do a little shopping and decided to stop by the hospital where our long journey started to say hello to the wonderful nurses in the nuero-intensive care unit at Methodist. Barbara began crying as we made our way down the long hallway, and I began to feel bad about taking her there. There were 4 or 5 nurses there and they all took the time for hugs, big smiles, and a small amount of catching up. It was a weird sort of deja vu for Jackie and Peter and me as we retraced much too familiar and painful steps. It was so wonderful to see that these special ladies who invested so much care and love in us still cared and loved! We hope to stop by again during a different shift to catch some of the others.

In an eerie coincidence, the room where it all began was uninhabited, and we got to go in for a quick peek. Barbara's memories of this part of her experience are very, very foggy. Think about how weird your dreamlife can be at times, and I suppose that might compare to what the experiences was like for her. Not that it was a dream by any stretch of the imaginootion. Rather, her memories are disjointed and bizarre at times. We're all thankful that she can't remember the horrors that her body went though. Barbara does hate that she lost a chunk of her life and missed so many important dates (thanksgiving, Christmas, anniversary, etc.).

I wish that we were rich in this one instance so that I could shower gifts upon the beautiful women who took care of us (they were important to me as well). I hope that our love and prayers will bless them and their families just as they blessed us. We simply don't give enough credit to the women (and men) who do the job of nursing. And this particular group of ladies raise a high standard for the rest.

Barbara continues to walk more and more at therapy. I'm so proud of her progress. This weekend she has been as giddy as a school girl to have our little girl and her, uh, not so little husband with us. We love them both and it's always so nice to have them here.

More updates will follow... I'm still here... and we still need your prayers. We're still wading through the muck and mess of Medicaid and we're blessed to have a man as wonderful as Curt Binnion helping us deal with insurance issues far too complicated for my mind's comprehension. Our live as been a series of blessings dotted with a few fleas of junk. Thanks to the blessings of your prayers and so many people, we're able to swat the fleas away and give God the glory He deserves. Even if you are not a follower of Christ, when you do good work, when you reach out a hand to help someone heal, you are doing the work of Christ.