ywam

wow, i just realized i havnt updated this blog for a while. We are north of Auckland about 2 hours drive serving at a ywam school as mission builders. A mission builder is someone who comes to a ywam base for a set time to help with any needs that the school base might have at the time. We spend our days cleaning, cooking, cutting fire wood, building, etc.


we have been very busy helping out. My niece Brittney has been here with us all week after her graduation from australia ywam in Townsville. It has been fabulous having her here! She is such a fun girl and has been helping out so much around the school. We just love that she could come! We have a church conference happening here this weekend. There are 3 local churches with many guest speakers to listen to and food to help serve. so we are very busy helping all weekend. Next week we are hoping to head out to the coast and do some exploring in northland.

I had an appointment with another dr this week. My stitches were taken out and everything looked good. I was then sent to a physiotherapist and was fitted with a removable brace. I need to take the brace off 4 times a day and start bending my wrist front to back and side to side very gently. I have days when i am so scared that my arm will never move like its supposed to again. it feels odd to not be able to twist my wrist or bend it. I know it has not been very long, but still not the most comfortable feeling.

Recovering

The surgery if done! I ended up spending 2 nights in the Masterton hospital. The surgery went better than I expected. Before the surgery, the surgeon explained that because of the complexity of the break. They didn't know what they may have to do to repair the bones until they were in. The options were that they may have to open both sides of my wrist to get at all the peices, they knew they would have to put in multiple screws and possibly a couple of plates, there was also the possibility of plates along my arm with bolts coming out through my skin.
Thankfully, they only needed to put in 1 plate plus screws and nothing coming through the skin! Yeah!
The masterton hospital staff is amazing. I couldn't have had better care. It is a new building in a nice size town and I would highly recommend it as a top notch hospital.
I am now at a farm with a family that we love. They have supported us through this whole ordeal and taken us in like family. What started out as a place for Dean and Colton to do some hunting, has turned into so much more. It is such a great feeling to have people like Adrian and Wendy to help us as we tread through this experience. We have no idea how we could ever show them how much we appreciate all they have done for us.
Tomorrow we leave for northland. It will be the start of another experience. The next part of our trip will be at a YWAM school called oakridge. We will be there helping with some work projects around the school.

Thanks for all the prayers!

arm update

I just realized that I left everyone who doesn't have facebook or our email hanging with my last post.  It has been a busy crazy week. the day i broke my arm, we went into Masterton to get it set. The Dr's there told us the bad news/ the break was not only a very bad one, but a very complicated one. my wrist is broken in 4 places the whole end of the bone was shoved up into my wrist where it completely broke off and also broke again  in half. plus a little chip broke off the other bone. which they are not concerned about.
so the scheduled the surgery for march 11th. but wanted to see me back in the hospital the next day to check on everything. so we drove back to the cabin where we had left the kids and then colton and i drove back the next morning while dean and Miranda stayed back to get some chores done.
by the time we got back to the cabin there was a message from the hospital that they wanted me to come the next morning so they could do the surgery early. we thought, great, lets do it. so we headed back into masterton, stayed in a local campground that had nice little cabins so dean and i could go in first thing and dean could travel back and forth with the kids as needed.
in the morning, we got checked into the hospital, they got me gowned up and i was in the or within the hour. we had met with the Dr right before i went in and he explained to us the complexity of the break again and also told us at that time that i may not get back full range of motion in my wrist. he said it was possible that i may only get about 50% motion. so that felt very scary to me. it was not at all what i had been thinking. but now we knew that it would be a possibility.

so off i went, said bye for now to dean and felt OK up until they were putting the intravenous in. thetas when it really hit me that this was real. i had a moment of fear. but had such a great nurse there to talk to and hold my hand. so nice.

a few minutes later i was asleep and then i woke up 2 hours later i think. the first thing i felt for was if i had screws poking out of my arm. this was my biggest fear. because they had also told us that  they may have to put plates and screws in my arm that would poke through my skin. if that's the case we couldn't leave NZ for about a month or so till they could be removed. not the plan.

so i was happy to not feel the pins. but soon after the nurse came and told me that they had not done the surgery. they had taken the cast off and noticed the xray machine was not working and they could not proceed as planned. they were very sorry about this huge mistake, the chief of surgery came and slaked to us and apologized.

so we came back to our cabin to wait for our original surgery date of march 11th.

We did a bunch of tasks around the cabin today. dean is still waiting to shoot a deer.

my arm and fingers are black and purple theses days. there isn't a lot of pain that a Tylenol and Advil wont fix. I've been taking a sleeping pill every night so I've been sleeping well. i had to stop the T3's. the codeine was doing a number on my guts.

getting a bit, OK a lot tired already of not being able to do anything with my arm. i cant get dressed, shower, cut my food ugh. it sucks. so does typing and writing with my left hand. though, I'm surprised how well i can do it.

the weather has been sunny and 22ish most days. though its really windy. which i hate. I'm starting to feel a little house bound and ready to head up north. I'm really hoping that we can leave this area after the surgery. i guess we wont know till afterwards when they know more. the dr who was going to do the surgery is out of town on Monday, so the next available guy will be doing the surgery. hopefully hes even better than the original guy. i mostly try not to worry to much about it. there really isn't much we can do anyways.

the best part of being here is that we can here the ocean and see the huge waves all day long. it is my favorite! unfortunately we are surrounded by wailing cows to. but i can usually block them out. even though i blame them for my broken arm. dang mean looking scary cows lol