January

January was a pretty quiet month. We all spent a lot of time together as a family. We spent a lot of time with my mom and at her house helping her clean things up and get some things organized. The storage room under the garage got completely cleaned out and we took a big trailer full of garbage to the dump. That was great! Then Gary and I....especially Gary, tackled the shed and all of dad's stuff out there. We took another 2 trailer loads to the dump (all 3 of the loads were around 1 ton of garbage!), we burned a lot of crap and cleaned and organized the rest. There are still odds and ends to do out there, but the majority is done. Then we got to the end of January when Sierra went snowboarding for the very first time. On January 20th she went with the school ski program and was fitted for a board, she was taking her mandatory lesson and they were headed up on the ski lift for the very first time......when she got to the top, she stepped off onto her board and went down. She had a freak kinda of accident and stepped wrong onto the snowboard and broke her tibia and fibula. The fibula just had a small little hairline type fracture in it. The tibia is a whole other story! As you can see in the x-ray, it's a pretty bad break. I'm surprised that that she didn't have to have surgery on it. It was because it was a clean break that she lucked out there. But that meant she has to spend a LOT of time in a cast to get it to heal just right. She was so brave through the whole thing. I got a phone call that night around 6 p.m.
They told me they were pretty sure that she had broken her leg and needed me to come up and get her. I was just pulling out of the drive way when Gary was pulling in, so I told him what was going on. He stayed home with the kids and called his dad to come stay with them so he could come help me with Sierra. I had help at the ski hill with the patrol to get her in the car and then Gary met us at the Community Care and helped me get her into a wheel chair and take her in to get her leg x-rayed. So she went down on the ski lift around 5;20-5:30. I picked her up about 6:30. Got her to Community Care just after 7. We x-rayed her leg, saw how bad it was and they told us we needed to take her to the hospital to have it set. So they stabilized it with a splint for her and then she was finally given some medicine for the pain. Up to that point she hadn't had anything! She never cried, nothing! She is one tough cookie! So up to the hospital we went. Dr. Lee got her leg set for her and we got back home around midnight. It was a long night.




The break was bad enough that she had to have it casted clear up to the top of her thigh. She had to stay in that cast for 6 weeks! Everyone wanted to sign it and they did. There were signatures from her toes to the top of her cast and all the way around.



After the six weeks they took of the big cast and downsized it to a regular calf-length cast. That was nice. It was a LOT smaller and easier for her to move around, that is after the swelling and stiffness worked it's way out of her knee.


She had to wear the smaller cast for 4 weeks. Yesterday, Friday April 2nd, she got the smaller cast off and now has a walking boot for at least another 4 weeks! Poor kid! But it's been okay doing it now.....better than this summer!