Broken Leg

Broken Leg   …   Wed 11^th June – Sun 15^th June

For reasons that you’ll understand in a minute, I have very mixed feelings about writing this blog. However, there are many friends that we haven’t been able to contact directly and I want everyone to know where we stand.

Wednesday started well enough, we were very excited and a little nervous to be taking out our first clients on a sunset cruise 6.30pm – 8.30pm. We headed in to the dock an hour before the scheduled departure time, did a few jobs and then met our clients as planned. We had a very pleasant cruise, sailing in light winds under somewhat grey skies. When we came back into the dock, Gloria jumped down onto the dock from the side of the boat to tie off our lines, just as she had done a few hours before and countless times at other locations. Only this time she was met by instantaneous and extreme pain in her right hip as she landed on the dock.  We would subsequently learn that on landing Gloria suffered a triple fracture of her femur / hip. After assessing the situation an ambulance was called and once Gloria was safely secured on a stretcher she was taken to hospital and I followed on behind in the car. We initially went to the hospital at Brunswick, but when the x-rays showed the nature of the damage, they put Gloria back in an ambulance and took her down to Maine Medical Hospital in Portland that has more expertise in dealing with this type of complex fracture. All in all we spent some 14 hours in emergency rooms and then around noon on Thursday the orthopedic surgical team operated to repair the fracture.

Some of you may know that Gloria had a hip replacement (of the “resurfacing” type) back in 2003 and it was this joint that was affected. I’m happy to say that the surgery went better than anyone expected and they were able to plate the damaged bone together without having to revise the original hip replacement - which seemed to be fine and well bonded to the bone. We were fortunate to end up at this hospital where one of the surgeons (Raymond White) is internationally renowned for his work in fracture repair. He was the only surgeon in the department willing to give the repair operation a try rather than go for a complete hip replacement. Gloria is now recovering in hospital and we hope to move her home to our house in Sudbury in the next day or two.

At this point I want to take a moment to thank a number of people for their outstanding support. The staff at Sebasco Harbor Resort were really great in calling for an ambulance and helping support us until it arrived and taking care of Cotinga in our absence. The medical staff have been terrific and how I am very impressed with the quality of care Gloria has received. We were also very touched that our clients from Wednesday evening, Susan and Charles, stopped by the hospital on Friday afternoon to visit Gloria, prior to flying back to their home in Texas.

Our plans for the rest of the summer are very much up in the air. Gloria of course won’t be going anywhere near a boat for quite a while and will need dedicated care over the next couple off weeks. Depending on how rapidly that progresses I may try and come back up to Sebasco Harbor in early July on a part time basis, perhaps 3 or 4 days a week, and try and keep the business going. But we’ll just have to see how things progress.

Mike