I Believe You Have My Stapler

The big news is that we’ve entered stage #5 — Shock Trauma, in-patient at Shepherd, outpatient at Shepherd, and back home to Maryland as #1-4 — with David heading back to work yesterday as #5. More milestones - hurray! 

As I’ve mentioned before, David’s been hitting the weights to get stronger and hopefully to have more function come back with that strength. While David isn’t on any field (he wasn’t before the accident either), we’re enjoying watching all the sports this fall.

On Friday night, we went to the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Homecoming Game. David’s alma mater (hopefully Matthew & Colin’s too!) is turning 100 this year so a great game for him to be at. We saw a bunch of our friends from our neighborhood (believe it or not, some of the husbands were there too - I’ve titled this “David and his Harem”) and also hung out with our dear friends Eric and Regina. 

Very importantly, we made it to our second Nats game and the last one of the season, which also happened to be our first/only one at Nats Park. We were thrilled to go with our friends Beth, Darryl, and their son Jacob - even if they are Mets fans. Darryl’s dad is the owner of the condo we’re staying in right now; we are so grateful for them lending it to us while our house is being renovated that we took them to a cold, windy game to see the two worst teams in the NL East! Such good friends!! The Mets had already clinched last place so not too much was on the line but we were so thankful to be at a baseball game with them. It was (Wet and Smelly) Pups at the Park Day - while I envied the dogs’ warm coats, I was thankful not to have London with us. 

Speaking of London, she decided she wanted in on the medical action and as such, is now wearing the donut of shame. She had a couple of spots/lumps removed and is currently taking better drugs than David is, and hey, at least David isn’t wearing a cone! We’ll hear back later this week about the pathology tests - fingers crossed that we don’t add cancer to the Sward family bingo card this year.

Triumph Construction is making significant progress at our house. The drywall went up this past week, the windows will be going in shortly, followed by the cabinets and all the rest of the things. We’re hoping to be home around Veteran’s Day (or at least starting to unpack by then). While I might have enjoyed picking out tile and paint colors a bit more if we’d been doing this reno strictly by choice, I’m most grateful to Mike and Andy at Triumph for making sure I don’t make any hasty, or frankly dumb, decisions. My question to them and their various vendors is, “What won’t I hate in 5 years?” Very inspired thinking, for sure. As of today I’ve avoided things I saw on HGTV 3 years ago, so I think that’s winning. 

And of course, last but certainly not least, David went back to work today! He’s starting back with 4 hours each for 4 days this week. Overall, he felt pretty good! He will be back up to full time between now and mid-November. Seeing his coworkers and doing some of the digging about what it has or has not happened in the last seven months was today’s priority.

He apparently cracked a dad joke at his 10:00 meeting - I’m just glad the boys and I have others to share his dad joke wealth with again. He’s using the Glassouse mouse that he controls by looking at it and using the bite tab to click. He will also soon have software called Dragon, that will allow him to dictate more easily. It will take him a bit of time to get used to all of that but so far, so good after Day One.  While there is no risk of “PC Load Letter” errors at this point, we remain vigilant and are in search of our red stapler. 

Thank you all for being with us on this journey. We literally could not do this without you. 

With gratitude, 

Erika & David