February 2nd, 2011 by Conor

Another day down, another day closer to heading home. It looks like they are going to take the drain out and then wait until Danny’s pain becomes manageable before they get him out of here. That might anytime within the next 4-8 days. It really just depends on how his pain is.

The major issue right now is the headaches that Danny is experiencing. Luckily, I never get headaches, so I can’t really relate to the pain that Danny is feeling. I hate headaches, and I know before this experience Danny had never really had many major headaches either. He is lucky that it is the only problem that he is really having to deal with at this point, but I don’t really know if Danny fully gets that yet. He hasn’t really seemed to grasp how big and potentially detrimental this could have been.

It might be awhile until he fully grasps what happened. Every time someones name comes into the picture of the recovery process he wonders “how does so-and-so know this happened?” I have to explain that there is a whole website and that there are people around the world that we don’t even know that know this happened. Danny you didn’t break a bone in your hand. You didn’t snap your wrist. You were critically injured and had 3 life threatening surgeries on your brain. Numbers were discussed with regards to your chances of survival. This was and is H U G E. This will likely in some way or another change the rest of your life- shoot I know it already has for me.

Although if anything we are on the good side of what could have been really bad its still hard to believe that things are so good. I hope that there are no major complications down the line with all this because it almost doesn’t seem possible that things are going so smoothly. I know that Michelle and I have both had multiple surgeries on one of our knees. Both of still experience some major creekyness in our knees as if they could use some oil and some reworking. At the moment, I am glad that it is my knee that has the complications. I can’t imagine how a brain works that needs oil. To Michelle and I our limitations are physical and are exposed when we try to stand up quickly or go for a jog. To Danny, his limitations might not be evident until a long time from now when he tries to do something like math or when he straps on his snowboard. Almost ANYTHING could be effected from a brain injury since it serves as such a hub for the whole body. I continue to cross my fingers everyday that he will continue to heal back to 100%. Because neither of us have experienced 4 surgeries on one of our knees. Danny has done that to his brain.

It might be a few weeks or months until he is really able to grasp the whole situation. It has to be hard trying to make sense of the whole thing when all you can think about is that that you have horrible headaches and want to get out of this hospital. I know that YOU, me, and everyone else out there have had four and a half weeks to process and try to make sense of this event. Soon it will hit Danny exactly how huge this all was. If not, good for him for not letting him skip a beat. But I sure as heck hope he grasps what this incident did to the rest of us. This has been the slowest, hardest month of my life.

Until tomorrow.

Conor