A day of good news.

If you’ve been reading this blog, then you know we had two big things going on today. The first was our plumbing leak being fixed and the second was Elijah’s first follow-up appointment. We have good news to report on both fronts.

The plumber showed up in the morning and got to work right away. They had to dig a whole new trench by hand, so they didn’t wait too late in the day to start on that since it’s so hot. When it was all said and done, it took them close to 4 hours to dig the trench, lay the new pipe, and get everything connected. We are glad that’s done and our bills should go back to normal.

While they were working on the yard, we took Elijah to his doctor appointment. Julia’s sister Jennifer took Abigail for us so we didn’t have to take her to the appointment. We got in to see the doctor pretty quickly and the appointment didn’t last too long. They took a couple of x-rays, and here’s a before and after so you can see what his hips looked like before the surgery and what they look like as of this morning.

If there’s one piece of bad news from all of this, it’s that there wasn’t a whole lot of healing between the two bones, but that’s also not surprising, so it’s not really bad news, just a little disappointing. The main thing they were looking at though, was his incisions. Up until now they have been covered with bandages that were left on since his surgery. Today we took those off and got to see his incisions for the first time. There is still some special tape covering them, and that will work itself off over time. The doctor liked the healing that had taken place with his incisions, and said we can now submerse them in water. That means he can either take a bath, or get into the swimming pool. Now, he’ll mainly just be sitting in the swimming pool, not really swimming, but she did say that he could walk a bit on his legs as long as the water was up to his chest or so. That way there still wouldn’t be much weight on his legs. I’ll put a picture of one of his incisions at the bottom of this post if you’d like to see it, but if not, be very careful and scroll down slowly so you don’t get all the way to the bottom. That’s your warning!

We’ll go back to see the doctor in another 3 weeks, at which point they’ll likely give us the go-ahead to start physical therapy. She said that’s pretty likely, even with the little amount of healing she saw today. That will still be a slow process, with him spending a lot of time sitting in his wheelchair or other chairs, and then spending short times walking or doing whatever exercises they tell him to. And that will last likely at least a few months. The total recovery will take even longer as his bones continue to heal and his muscles continue to strengthen. But none of that is a surprise to us.

Overall, it was a good report and he’s making appropriate progress. I will say he did seem a little more uncomfortable today, but some of that was likely due to us not giving him his medicine as often as our schedule was a little off today. Even so, he’s still doing very well with his pain. We also had the doctor take a quick look at his bottom, and she didn’t seem too worried about his rash. She just told us to continue using the ointments and it should hopefully go away.

Here are a couple pictures of Elijah checking out a fountain by the doctor’s office.

After the doctor’s appointment, we went to Grandma and Grandpa Rice’s Shop for a while and then picked up Abigail. After rest time we played some Mario Kart, and then had a delicious dinner provided by the Buchers.