Today is the 3 year anniversary since the accident !

Yikes !

Well, bit of a gap in the blog, because of my Red Sea diving trip.

Jane and Ronnie spent the week with Karen. Thanks girls.

Karen thought they may be watching a DVD while I was away, but unfortunately we don’t have a DVD player in the front room, we just use the xbox to play dvds. Not a problem when I am there, ‘cos I always control it. But, the girls wouldn’t have a clue how to do it on the xbox.

So, I had to leave “step-by-step” instructions because there was no way kp could take in all of this…..

They had a great week.I had an awesome diving trip.

Here are a couple more photos…..

Here is one of the VERY few photos of my dive buddy Dave (left).

Mahmood is the youngest of the crew (right), and if we kept him supplied with fags, he’d make sure we had 10% more air (220 bar).

On one of the days, we visited an island in the middle of the Red Sea (totally deserted).

On it, there was a Sea Eagle’s nest. As we approached the nest, the Sea Eagle flew up and went up and down the coastline, until we retreated back. Here’s what he was protecting…..2 Baby Sea Eagle chicks…..They didn’t fly off, probably because they hadn’t fledged yet, but they knew exactly how to “play dead”….

Here is a picture from our boat (SnapDragon), of 2 dolphins swimming within 20m of the boat. As with all photos, clicking on them instantly makes them “Go Large”.

Another one of me, but this time with some small fish and some fire coral. The white tips (if you touch them) give you a nasty rash.

I think this is at the Thistlegorm – me putting my head through a porthole….

This is the Thistlegorm again. It had 2 steam trains on the deck and with the force of the explosion they were thrown 20m off the deck.

Nice sunset….

Octopus with good camouflage…..

Me posing again……

This is a stonefish. The most deadliest fish on the planet. You really don’t want to step on one of these or touch one. The pain (en route to death) is supposed to be unimaginable. The trouble is their camouflage is so amazing they are VERY hard to spot.

I texted Karen 2 or 3 times a day while I was away and rang her whenever the signal would allow, but it was still great to be back with her.

We are so rarely apart nowadays that missing each other happens so quickly. It’s a shame she couldn’t come, but although there were quite a few calm days where she would have been fine(ish), there were also some less calm days where she wouldn’t have been able to walk at all without falling over. There was one particularly rough day where noone could walk at all. We were being tossed everywhere. You had to crawl on all fours, and going down the “near vertical” steps between decks, was very treacherous.

Back to “real life” now…..

This last week saw everything return to “normality”.

Few tears, and tiredness remains the predominant issue.

I had took the monday off, ‘cos I didn’t get back until about 2am on the monday morning.

The first day back was pretty much filled with sleep and catching up with kp.

Tuesday, I was on a course, but could only attend for the morning, as we had the MDT meeting. (multi-disciplinary team meeting). This was one of the ones where the solicitors didn’t come. They had a name for it (something like therapeutic). It was good to get everyone’s input.

Present were Steve (physio), Rachel (OT), Ann (NP), Doreen, Syd, kp and me. Basically, they go round the table and everyone goes through how Karen is doing.

She has done so well since this rehab period started.

Steve said that initially she had scored 48/56 on some balance scale and that she was now a 56/56 !!! Big improvement. He has to now move her to a different scale to measure balance and warned her not to expect a good score initially.

Rachel also complimented kp on her commitment and progress. She had some scales that she measured kp on and there was improvement again !!!

Ann (neuro-psychologist) hadn’t completed the assessments yet, because every time kp had attended, they had HAD to refocus on to getting kp’s mood up, as she often got upset at the sessions. She is going to try and complete the assessments over the next few sessions.

Syd agreed that she had made great progress.

He also mentioned that he had bought Karen a Wii-Fit. It’s a nintendo wii with sort of a weighing mat, but it has LOADS of super things for Karen to help her improve her balance. I am really pleased at this, because I think kp will REALLY enjoy it, and it’s something we can do together !!

The following day, we had to go and see Mr Wilkinson.

Long story short….. We saw our GP a few months back about Karen’s pain. It was getting bad for kp.

Let’s say she was on 400mg Fentanyl per day (the maximum allowed), we had nowhere to go with the pain and referred us on to Mr Khalil (pain consultant specialist). He agreed she was on the max dosage of Fentanyl (morphine patch) and suggested Dorsal Columm Stimuation and referred us on to Mr Eldabe who recommended Intrathecal Drug Delivery. Our local GP said he would put her up to 600mg Fentanyl as there was a more long term solution on the horizon.

ok…..bearing all that in mind……

Our solicitor approached “the other side”’s solicitor to seek funding for this expensive intrathecal drug delivery. They looked into it with their medico-legal people and came back and said “we want to be sure that this is the right move” because of the costs and also the fact, it involved surgery again for kp.

Would we mind getting a second opinion ?

Well, we didn’t mind at all. kp didn’t really want this solution anyway and would have preferred the Dorsal Column Stimulation (which still required surgery, but wasn’t reliant on morphine etc….)

So, Mr Wilkinson was the second opinion. Nice bloke. He asked us LOADS of questions and in the end he couldn’t decide which way to go. He summed it up as follows……

With the status quo, the pain is under control, but with the 600mg Fentanyl, kp is well over the maximum dose and risks damage to the Endocrine system, plus she has to struggle on with all the bowel issues from such high doses of Fentanyl.

On the other side, if she went down the Intrathecal Drug Delivery route, she runs the risk of Meningitis (the spinal cord sac thing can get infected apparently), and she would have to go to the hospital every 4-8 weeks to get the pump refilled.

The bowels would probably be much improved.

Rock and Hard Place.

He really couldn’t decide the best route to take and asked us what we thought and he would be guided by the patient’s opinion. We didn’t know either way.

So, we were left in limbo land. He said he would do some thinking after we had left and write a response.

So….. ??????

At one point, he said to Karen (and I could have hit him !)…..

Mr Wilkinson :- “There isn’t really anywhere we can go with your pain relief”.

At this point, I could see Karen well up, but she managed to keep the tears at bay !!! Well done love !

It bugs me when things like this happen…..

That is “BIG NEWS” to anyone on maximum pain relief and it just slipped out. Grrrr !!

Karen kept asking him questions from a patient’s perspective (good on ya kp), but Mr Wilkinson had to keep saying that he is not seeing her on a consultant basis, but from a medico-legal perspective and so he couldn’t really go down that route of questionning. Basically, he was saying, I have been told to give my professional opinion to “the other side’s” solicitor about what I think is the best course of action for pain relief.

kp didn’t really get this

The tears started rolling whilst we were on our way back home. She had latched on to some of his comments and she got upset that there may be nowhere to go for the pain relief etc etc…..

Very sad. Hearing something like this has a knock-on effect on lots of other thought processes for kp and the rest of the week saw kp very subdued.

kp wasn’t her full self.

On the friday night, Ethan came over, and then an hour after he arrived, he wanted to go back to his mum. He’s 10 and wasn’t feeling very well, so I took him home.

Yesterday, we went to see Marie’s new dog “Strike”.

Gorgeous lurcher – lovely nature.Here he is……

That’s it for this last week. I hope Karen’s mood improves. She is seeing Ann (the NP) this week. So it really could go either way !!!