Some Troubled Waters

In July one night on my way into work I got a call from my aunt. Well anyone knows that a phone call 11:30 at night isn't generally good news. It turns out it wasn't great, my dad was in the hospital with a very bad infection that was threatening the loss of his foot and possibly leg.

A little bit of backstory here, my father is diabetic, he hasn't always had the best control of his sugars and the day Madeline was born he stubbed his big toe getting into the shower and ripped off a chunk of the toenail. Well due to some compromised blood flow in his leg, due to years of smoking and the diabetes the toe didn't heal well and got infected. About a month after Madeline was born the infection was bad enough that his doctors decided to amputate the toe.

Well a couple of weeks after the amputation my brother graduated from high school, dad had been doing well and decided to wear a regular shoe instead of the open toed boot he was wearing for the graduation and party. This caused dirt to get driven into the still healing wound and about a month later he landed in the hospital facing the loss of his foot and possibly leg.

I took the next day off from work and went up to the hospital (about 90 minutes from home) with Madeline to visit him. He was in pretty good spirits for having already been in the hospital a week and having had surgery the prior day to remove infection and part of the foot. He was in the hospital for a few more days to observe and make sure the infection was clearing with the help of the antibiotics they were pumping through him and lots of dressing changes by skilled nursing staff. He also had surgery to restore circulation to the leg which was thankfully successful. He walked out of the hospital with two legs and still is doing well.

While I was at the hospital I got a call from my department manager.She wanted to know if I could switch to day shift for the summer. We had several people leave our department due to staffing reductions while I was out on leave and we were also training on a new system of doing things so I was one of 3 operators that was more skilled in one area. One was in and out dealing with a family health crisis of her own and the other was on afternoons for the summer for childcare reasons. So for the rest of the summer I worked 5am-1pm and my mother in law came over to watch Madeline for an hour or so between Mr. S leaving for work and me getting home.

I really enjoyed my summer of working better hours and being able to spend more time with Madeline but as usual good things don't always last, Labor Day rolled around and I had to go back to working overnight. We decided to try a new shift though and so far it has worked out much better. I work from 3am-11am. It sometimes is a very hard shift for sleeping purposes but I get to see my daughter and husband and my mother in law comes over for a couple hours in the afternoon a few days a week and while she takes care of/plays with Madeline I nap.