Back home for now
 .Its such a sweet autumn day outside - a gentle sun, the birds singing all of that - its my favourite time of the year. I am thinking of my daughter Melissa and her husband and where they are right now in a small room at the hospital trying to come to terms with whats happened. I wonder how much my own mum sat in her old house in Scone and though about us when Don first had his accident in 1982... A leg is not as bad as a broken neck but I think the diabetes may be worse than they think because for someone so young to lose a leg from it means something is very wrong. I just worry about the future for them...issues such as having a family and all of that. My saving was that we had two dear little girls, and who could be serious around them - she has nothing really to keep her cheerful in the face of this, and I just hope she doesn't do what she has been doing for too long and put her own life on the back burner. T

So some more weeks at the hospital than the same again in Rehab (live in)  - one Physio said to Chris "Your wife will have to come to see what she's in for!" Honestly - the soul of tact. What the silly twit didn't know was that at 12 Melissa was physically able and needed to get her own dad into bed from his wheelchair and undressed  when i was ill - she and Ali knew which tablets to get and when and helped with the ramps to the van and all sorts of extras only those living in home with someone with extreme disability can know. Many Physios, nurses and social workers and doctors just do not understand that what they see in hospitals is not how it is at home. At home children are needed to get fathers to bed...to empty urine bags, to take blood pressures, to help so as to have as normal a family life as possible...we all pulled together.

Chris appears to be making a steady recovery and it appears that this has bought he and Melissa closer.

I had an interesting call from a doctor in Sydney who is a true patients' advocate - one of the real ones - he has just finished reading my book and we talked for some time - wants to meet one day as I offered to do whatever i could to help in this area. He said he went backwards and forwards to his wife almost at the end of each page because what i was describing - he knew was what he had seen himself. So who knows - it may end up changing things in some what...he said that one day i will be vindicated.

I told him I was going to Tafe to get some skills as I really have no marketable skills - and you know what he said - he said, "you have the most important skill needed..tenacity." So if tenacity is in the job description well then!