So February 4, 2011, that would be the 18 month mark since the day of my accident, a year and a half. I don’t think that I could have ever quite grasped the understanding, even if someone explained it to be in great detail, of what an injury like this consisted of as far as time needed to heal with ongoing and new issues that arise.

Here is a picture that shows how my eyes are healing. They still have a while to go with hope that the skin tones will even out enough that I won't look like I've been in a recent bar fight!

I have an appointment at the burn unit on the Feb 22 and I’m pretty certain that it will be my last. My appointment back in August was right after the year anniversary of my accident, and at that appointment they thought I was doing better than expected. They tried to get me to stop wearing my compression garments on my legs three months prior to that appointment and told me I could probably start phasing out the torso compression sometime around September, but I could never feel like It was time to give up on them and always hoped that the scars would end up looking better than they do. The ultimate decision of when to be done wearing the compression is something they always leave up to the patient to decide. I took a couple different attempts where I would go a few days without wearing the compression garments and trying to monitor how the scars would change but always opting to continue wearing them. I might have just been letting my mind play tricks on me but I always felt that the scars were still raising and still needed more time to mature before abandoning the compression. After every attempt at not wearing the garments for even the shortest of time I would always go back putting them on and wearing them almost religiously.

I'm not going to mention the itching factor today because it makes me itch just thinking about it.

I do realize that at least 50% of the healing process for me was and continues to be the mental/emotional game I seem to struggle with on a daily basis. A big step that I took in beating this game happened on Christmas morning when I decided that the Christmas gift to myself was to allow myself to accept the way my body and scars look and be done with the leg and torso compression once and for all. I found the perfect size box to fit the folded garments in and hide away until I need them for show and tell for my kids when they ask me what happened and how I got all of my scars. I think there is just enough room in that box for all of my compression sleeves and mask when that day finally comes.

Since I mentioned the mental/emotional game that I have no choice but to play, in which most days would better be described as a war, I should probably try to explain at least a part of what that involves. For the first six months following my accident I had a very hard time dealing with constant images and thoughts swirling through my head. I, being a very analytical thinker couldn’t stop trying to piece together the details of my accident looking for an answer of what went wrong and why it happened. Without an answer my brain would not give me peace.

I think that after the first six months following my accident I was so mentally drained from the constant replay of events in my head that my brain decided to shut down that section of thought for a while. In reality I know that I had just received another answer to my prayers for some much needed peace and calmness. The other things going on in my life that had become priority took a lot more of my focus and had become a huge blessing of distraction from my accident. It seems however that for the past 5 or 6 months that the thoughts have been slowly building up and finding their way back into my daily routine.

One of the classes I have been taking this semester at school is a public speaking class. I have always had speaking anxiety and would have probably never registered for the class if it were not a requirement for my major. Of the four speeches that I will be required to give for the class I hope that the first one will turn out to be the most difficult. I gave this speech last Saturday. The topic of the speech was a simple self-introduction. Tell something about myself or share something from my life in a 5 minute speech. I wish it were as simple as it sounded. I spent a couple of days thinking about different things from my life that I could share as an interesting story and fit into the time parameters. Out of all of the things from my life that I’ve done or experienced I couldn’t stop coming back to the idea that I should just share the story of my accident. I really had some serious doubts about that decision after I had laid down an outline and started practicing for my speech out loud. It turned out to be a very time consuming project as I kept repeatedly rehearsing and timing myself to try to fine tune my presentation, taking out different details that I thought were too graphic or didn’t help the story move along.
While taking notes from the dozens if not fifty times that I recorded myself running through and reliving the events of that morning I realize that there are still certain things from that day and the months following that I have a hard time sharing with people, especially with a room full of complete strangers. To fit that experience into a five minute speech and cutting out details that I still cannot emotionally get through, definitely leaves the story in an abbreviated form.

The speech itself went as well as could be expected coming from a person standing in front of an audience of strangers riddled with anxiety that was amplified by the self consciousness that comes with wearing a mask on ones face while sharing one of the most emotional things to have ever happened to themselves fearing that at any moment one of the shared details might be the emotional straw to break the camels back to ultimately end in a display of physical collapse and balling on the floor!

I made it through without the break down or wetting my pants and I seemed to have done a relatively good job at hiding the anxiety, with the exception of a couple of cracks in my voice that made me sound like a 14 year old. The video of the speeches that the teacher made and posted online will always remind me that I was able to get through it.

The main thing that I learned form the assignment really had nothing to do with public speaking skills. It let me know that when the thoughts of my accident or life get to the point of being overbearing, that working through it in my head over and over again like I have always done can be a good thing but only if it is paired with the opportunity to vent it out verbally in some way. I have had a much calmer mind concerning my accident since I shared a part of it with people.

Feeling like I have had success in one more battle gives me hope that I can survive the war.

Mark the Year

Well it’s been nearly five months since I have posted on here so I’m sure I am just doing this for myself, as everybody has probably stopped checking this blog months ago.

I know that blog’s are boring without pictures but I can’t think of an appropriate picture to post today.

Today is August 4th 2010, the one year anniversary of my accident. It has been a year of pain and trials and healing, of changes and learning and humbling, all of which I am thankful for or know I will be thankful for some day.

Physically I am doing as well or better than can be expected. I have been going back to the gym on a regular basis, as regular as I had been before my accident, which is three weeks committed and two weeks too busy to make it. I feel like my strength is 85% of my former self but improving week by week, on my three committed weeks at least.
My physical pain has been at a very low consistent level for months now. It’s one of those things that fades so gradually that it would be impossible for me to actually mark on a calendar the milestones in the pain reduction. If I was any good at keeping a journal or updating a blog for that matter, I could go back and find the exact date of when I knew I was done taking pain killers and accepted the pain that I couldn’t avoid. That is definitely the biggest milestone in my mind.

As for my wounds themselves, everything with the exception of my right elbow is healing and looking really good, good being a relatively loose term. My doctors think that my skin is healing well and thought that I should try a trial period of not wearing the compression on my legs to see if the scars were mature and done raising. That was at my last appointment back in May. I went two days and felt like they were still raising or swelling, so I continue to wear the pants. As of the May appointment I also have switched from a one piece compression top to wearing new sleeves and a torso vest. I don’t have new vests, I just cut the arms off of my old one piece tops.
Everyone always asks how long I’ll have to continue wearing all of the compression garments and the only answer I can give them is, as long as it takes. I do go through short periods where I don’t wear my vest and pants, mostly determined by how hot the day is going to be. But my sleeves will be a fixture of my wardrobe for quite a while longer as my arms were injured the worst. My mask is the same, I’ll just keep wearing it until it feel like the right time. I just don’t want to have any regrets in 5 years when I am past the main part of this.

I know that I’ve never properly thanked my family and friends for all that they have done for me over the past year and that is because I don’t know how.
I can say Thank You every minute of every day for the rest of my life and still not feel right. The time and effort spent to come visit me in the hospital is alone something that I can never properly repay, and the visits and the prayers are the only things that kept me going when I so badly though I couldn’t go on any more.
The way my parents stepped up and became my nurses when I came to live with them after I was released from the hospital is something that few people could do, and they jumped in with both feet and did an amazing job and continue to do so.

Debbie and Andy took pictures and documented my time in the hospital and some of the time healing at my parents house, and compiled it all in a nice book for me. I started looking at it when they initially gave it to me but found out quickly that I wasn’t ready to see the images and revisit it all, and it still sits unopened waiting for the day I think I can handle the memories.

That brings up my the topic of my mental and emotional state on this anniversary day. I’ve had people telling me for weeks that I need to prepare for this day and for the emotions and memories it will probably bring. They keep reminding me that I should plan to take the day off work and plan something fun to distract myself. I just keep telling them and myself that I would be fine if they would just quit reminding me about it and let life go on normally.
Even as I sit here to type this I’ve had to pause a couple times to collect myself from the waves of emotion and memories that I have no control over. I’m not sure what the rest of the day or days following has in store for me.
I know that on Sunday I had a specific moment that started a series of flashbacks about my accident and the explosion itself that have been getting more frequent as today has drawn closer, but the specific emotions have been blurred together with the emotions that I have been dealing with from the other tragedy in my life.
As of two weeks ago I found myself changing my relationship status from Happy to Single and have been coping with the pain caused by the loss and loneliness.

I will forever feel guilty for being the one that put Catherine and her kids through the pain and heartache caused by my accident and adding to the list of tragedies in their lives. But I will always be grateful that they were there to help me get through it. And that is definitely an understatement!

I'll trade you for a new Elbow

So what has it been, two months?

I guess a lot can happen in two months, lets start with my elbow.

At my last doctors visit which was back on Feb 26^th the doctors and therapists thought that everything was looking good and the sore on my elbow was healed to about a half a centimeter or the size of a pencil eraser. Sounds good since it started out being 2.5 inches in diameter, but it took four months to heal to the size of a pencil eraser. I have to put some custom cut pads, cut by my mom or me on the sores to protect them from friction caused by my compression garments. If it wasn’t for needing help to get them positioned under the compression garments on my elbows I would be able to do all my wound care myself.

A couple days before my last Dr appointment a new little sore started to develop about half an inch from the nearly healed sore, in the same spot as the original big sore started. The doctor said he couldn’t even see it so it probably won’t be a problem. It is a problem!

Within the three weeks that I have been fighting the sore form getting bigger it has gone from looking almost completely healed to not looking so good to looking a bit better and yesterday the two sores were both about the size of a pencil eraser.

Today when I started doing wound care and took off my Compression and bandage pad the newest sore had DOUBLED in size and is now just a little smaller than a dime.

Since the doctors have never ruled out the fact that I might need another skin graft on my elbow it makes me wonder how long I’m going to have to go before they make the call.

Since the doctors think that everything else is looking good they had me make my next appointment in Three months, May something, and just said to make a new appointment if anything changes for the worse. If the new sore is bigger tomorrow I’m making the call.

Catherine, Scott, Matthew and I went snowboarding again on the night of FEB 6^th. We made it up to Brighton for a nice freezing night session. It was a fun time and it was great to be able to teach Matthew how to snowboard and he was flying down the hill before the night was over. Scott was doing super good too and got his first taste of the icy walls of a half pipe. Of course Catherine was Skiing circle around us all and looking really good doing it!!!

After getting home and taking off the rest of my gear I was taking off my socks and felt a little unusual pain. I rolled up the bottoms of my compression paint to discover a gigantic blister on my right shin and a small blister that went all the way around the bottom of my left leg. I almost wanted to cry, had I known that my boots were rubbing blister on my legs I would have called it an early night, but any skin that was burned has lost most of it’s sensitivity and I had no idea what was happening. They popped a couple days later and were painful for a couple days after but have now all but healed completely.

I will think of some more things to report on later but my Benadryl is starting to kick in and I just drooled in my laptop

The Torture Mask? Not so much

I don’t know yet why some mornings I wake up and am still wearing my cloth mask and other mornings it is off and next to me on the bed.

The mask that is posted on Nov 6, 2009 and nicknamed the “Bank Robber Mask”, turned very Quickly into the Torture mask when I put it on the first night and discovered that it wasn’t pleasant to wake up gasping for air while feeling like someone had their hands gripped tightly around my neck.

For almost the entire month of November and into December this manner of waking up tormented me at night. It was so bad that when I went for check up appointment at the burn unit and they asked how I was doing with the mask I couldn’t help getting a little choked up and emotional explaining the problem. Because of this near breakdown the great nurses decided that it was too traumatic and I should stop wearing the Torture mask altogether and try to wear my plastic mask while sleeping instead.

The problem isn’t the masks but my weird sleep/night terror issues, the masks were just adding to them. The nurses said if the plastic mask didn’t work either to just stop wearing one to sleep altogether, since they could tell that I hadn’t had a full nights rest in some time.

After two night of trying the plastic mask with the same results I decided to give up on the idea altogether. It is amazing the difference it makes to not wear one of these compression masks for a few hours, mostly with my eyes. Going a whole night without I would wake up with extremely dry eyes and my bottom lids pulled down.

I continued to sleep that way for nearly 8 nights before deciding that it was going to be crucial to my recovery to wear a mask at night. I was also feeling like I had let this beat me and I quit to easily so I was going to give it another try.

The first few days back at it I had the same terrifying result of waking up feeling like I was suffocating, but then one morning I woke up and the mask was just off lying next to me, no terror involved.

I spent Christmas Eve night on a couch in Provo (thanks Anne and Pete) and took my mask along with me. I woke up to a Christmas miracle, my mask was still on my head. I thought that maybe I had only dosed off for a second and had been awaken by a noise or something, but a quick check of my clock had confirmed that I had beaten my alarm by 20 min and I had made it through the night.

Since the Christmas Miracle I have about a 50% success rate of going the whole night wearing the mask. My record is 3 night in a row so far. Even the nights when I do take the mask off I must be doing it in my sleep while placing it gently next to me and not flinging it across the room. It probably helps that I take a Benadryl before bed, which puts me in a coma like deep sleep.

I Woke up this morning with the mask still on and this is what my eyes look like after taking it off. Now if I can only figure out how to do something about the color of the grafts under my eyes. I'm the only one I know that has light circles under my eyes instead of dark.

Snowboarding?????

Danny is healing well. He even attempted his first snowboarding outing on New Years Eve. We took my three boys night skiing (so Danny could avoid the sun) for a few hours. It was really low key, but fun to just get out. The kids asked Danny how the outing ranked on a scale of 1 to 10. He gave it a 2--but hey that's a start!


The plastic mask wouldn't fit under his helmet so he opted for the cloth one. His goggles and neck gator disguised him pretty well. The temperature dipped into the teens after the sun went down which made his arms stiffen up a bit but over all he looked like he had a good time.

Catherine...

Overdue Update

Keeping a Blog up to date is not something I will probably ever be good at, and I know it’s a little behind when I get calls from people wanting directions to my parents house so they can come visit me. They seem to be surprised when I tell them that I moved back to my own house almost a month ago.

I still need help with my daily wound care so I go back to my parents’ house every afternoon to take a shower and change my bandages and compression garments. The only spots that are having trouble healing are my elbows and the occasional new friction blister on my arms, other than that my skin seems to be healing well.

I spend most of the morning in bed where it is warm and my stretching is a bit less painful and then try to get a quick workout before the stretch is gone. It's a little frustrating to get to the gym three blocks from my house after spending all morning stretching and have to re-stretch all over again. For the past week or so my right arm seems to stay stretched out a little longer but my left arm gets tight very quickly. My legs are doing quite well but still get tight if they are in the same position for too long. My tooshy starts to ache if I sit on it for more than 45 Min but is also getting better.

Wearing my masks is something I should probably wait to discuss on a later post because right now my description of them would likely be laced with curse words.

I’ve started new posts a couple of different times but never posted them because everything I was writing seemed to sound really negative. Even though It’s hard to find many positive aspects of what I have to deal with I don’t see why I should let it turn me into a negative person. However, I think I should allow myself a couple of negative paragraphs just to try and get it out of my system…

Within the thirty three years that I have been on this planet I have had more close calls and been in more sketchy situations with the potential outcome of serious injury or death then most people I know. Every time I’ve been able to walk away with a new scar or some new teeth and always with a new story to tell, and always thinking that I’ve learned something from the experience, mostly what Not to do next time I find myself in the situation. Some of my friends might remember my philosophy of “if you’re not hurting then you’re not riding hard enough”, or something that relates to No pain No gain. Of course this way of thinking is what put me in most of those Sketchy situations. Even though this philosophy applies mostly to my hobbies and sports that I love to do and has helped me to reach goals and push myself to learn new things within those areas, it also applies to all areas of my life. Whether it’s feeling the anxiety of quitting your job to start a company or the embarrassment that is felt when asking someone out on a date for the first time, despite being rejected or not. All the good things in my life seem to start out with a little (or A Lot of) discomfort.

(Here is my Negative paragraph so you may want to stop reading here!!!)

Since my accident my life has been turned upside down and I feel that I have lost control of my future. I’ve experienced a new level of pain that I didn’t really understand existed before and it has left me Physically disabled, emotionally broken and often times mentally drained. I’m having a really hard time grasping what I am going to Gain from all this Pain or what lesson Heavenly Father wants me to learn. It’s really hard to keep the negative thoughts of why me?, what did I do to deserve this? at bay when I see myself in the mirror and know that I am permanently disfigured for the rest of my life. It’s also hard to curb those thoughts when I think that within one year I’ve had the best thing and the worse things to ever happen to me, and the best thing may never be the same. It’s hard to be positive when the constant itching gets to the level where I can think of nothing else and on a nightly basis it wakes me from my sleep, while at the same time not being able to do anything about it for risk of further damaging my fragile skin. It’s hard to find anything positive after I wake up gasping for air from being suffocated by the mask that I am supposed to wear while I sleep and ripping it off in a rage of claustrophobia that results in damage to my still healing ears.

Sorry and Thanks for letting me vent, I’ll try to never let it happen again…

DANNY

Danny the Bank Robber

Danny's latest acquisition is this lovely gray mask he is supposed to sleep in every night. It covers his entire head and neck and is extremely uncomfortable. He modeled it for me the other night. After three nights of trying to sleep in it he's ready to give up. Apparently it suffocates him and he wakes up after 30 minutes gasping for air. Sounds fun doesn't it?

Catherine