Week #3 of The Sling

Well, here at last is a photo of this awful contraption taken by Gail during our Maryland Tour last weekend. It does kind of envelope my whole right side, doesn't it? I was at the Amish market and you can see their horses in the background. I've gone through 3 sessions of physical therapy and believe me, this is going to be a long haul. I can lift my right arm at 110 degrees - a bit more than right angle to my body.
Gail, unfortunately, flew out Tuesday and I was all alone for the first time in 2 weeks, which was gloomy for me. Not only that, but Veeka suddenly came down with a fever at noon so the last thing Gail ended up doing was racing to the daycare to pick up Veeka and bringing her home and putting her to bed while I nabbed a co-worker who drove me back home. Fortunately the Little One "only" had a 24-hour virus that most of the little kids - I later found out - in the neighborhood all got but all the same, it was nasty seeing her temperature rise and being trapped, unable to drive even to a pharmacy. A friend who has 7 kids took pity on me and brought us some cooked rice, iced popsicles and Tylenol suppositories to get medicine into Veeka since it's hard to ingest orally when you're vomiting. That got me through the night - it's so nasty when you live alone and you can't run to a pharmacy when there's a sick kid at home.
Later in the week, a similar situation arose where I needed to run out for 10 minutes but Veeka had just fallen asleep and it was so frightfully hard to get her down for a nap, I was frantic not to wake her. Fortunately I spotted a neighbor gardening who graciously agreed to sit in my home to watch Veeka while I went and picked up someone at the Metro (only a mile away so I can drive that far) who had come for the day to help me clean the house. And starting tomorrow, I have a succession of friends - most of them part of a Sunday night Catholic prayer group I attend - who are bring us meals. With this arm, it is excruciating to slice veggies or work the can opener. So we've had lots of cheese, crackers and sausage lately.
In the midst of all this mess, I was working full time and ended up - during a four-day work week (cuz of Memorial Day) putting out six articles. Need to slow that pace down. The second photo, also taken by Gail, is of Veeka and one of the Amish girls in a buggy. Veeka has a way of elbowing her way into every photo op.