Wrecks

On the front page of today's Durango Herald were stories of two horrific car crashes: one was a rollover, killing a local 7th grade girl, and the other was a head-on collision which exploded into flames, killing the father and 10yr old son, and leaving the mother and 12yr old brother in intensive care with severe burns. I cannot fathom the pain those families and survivors are experiencing/will experience, and it makes our situation seem benign.

Whenever Nick's good eye moves, the other one moves with it because the muscles were attached to whatever they put in there, and he says the pain is excruciating, the worst since they hit the power line. Then he read the Herald and he goes, "...well, maybe not excruciating..."

He looked so forlorn when we picked him up this evening, but he finally took a pain pill and livened up again. Just say YES to drugs! The intense pain should subside within the next few days, if my google research is correct. He sees our eye doc tomorrow, the hand doc next week, and if all goes well, the dentist next week too, so things are looking up.

Hopefully he'll be able to get some sleep. Normally sleeping in the hospital is more difficult than at home because every time you doze off they come in to take your vitals, but seeing as Acacia decided tonight that in order to fall asleep she needs to play the recorder, Nick might wish he were back in ABQ! She started playing two minutes after getting tucked in. I let it go for a while and when I eventually headed to her room Cayenne was halfway there and goes, "Oh good, you're here. It's unbelievably annoying." Acacia claimed she'd tried everything to fall asleep and nothing was working. "Really? You tried for the whole two minutes?" She agreed to swap the recorder for the fleece I was wearing, curled up with my scent and fell asleep before my body heat had dissipated from the sweatshirt. Love that.

Reminds me of one of the nights in France when she called me to their room to say she couldn't sleep because her "legs felt like wax." Huh? Cayenne just giggles. Built-in entertainment. A while later she called me back to the room:
"I can't sleep because that painting freaks me out."
"What painting?"
"The one with the gravestone thing in it, with the photo of Francoise standing by the same gravestone in real life (tucked into the frame). That is freaky. And anyway, my legs feel like wax." Minutes later she was out.

In reality Acacia falls asleep as quickly as I do, and it's Cayenne who lies awake for a while, like her Papa, pondering things. I just hope everyone upstairs has slipped into deep slumber, so we can face tomorrow fresh, an option the families from the newspaper don't even have. I just can't get them out of my mind.

Man, we're lucky.