WEEKLY WTF
09-09-24 Edition
Maisie Mae
Sept. 1
I hate that I’m posting this, but I am feeling powerless and desperate to help my Daughter however I can and by whatever means. Thursday the 29th my Daughter Maisie was a passenger in a vehicular roll over. She broke her upper spine at C5 & C6. She is paralyzed from the ribs down. She can move her forearms but not her fingers. She is alive though and suffered no brain damage at all. She is still herself for which we are grateful but she is paralyzed, in terrible pain and devastated. She is 18 and was at her first week of college at Chico state. I hate that I’m posting this but I need to talk about it and make it real so that I stop trying to wake up from the nightmare. If we are friends or related and you are finding out this way then I am truly sorry but this is all I can do right now. We are at the Enloe medical center in Chico, Ca. ICU unit for several more days and we promised Maisie that we wouldn’t leave her alone for 1 single second. I have never gotten over my difficulties in asking for help but that ends now for the sake of my little girl. I would tear heaven and earth apart for her but am limited to only being able to scratch her face when it itches, feeding her sips of water and staying by her side. This is the only other thing I can think to do right now, something I’ve never done on here: ask for help. This is not a sympathy post I don’t want that. I want to humbly ask that if you are someone who prays, please take a moment to look at her picture and say an earnest prayer for my little girl, her name is Maisie Mae. If you don’t pray then I humbly ask that you think a good thought for her. I’m not asking for hope or wishes, those imply that she is not whole and may never be. I ask that you generate a sincere feeling of gratitude, broadcasted into the universe that my Daughter, Maisie Mae, will regain use of her body. The Surgeons say they don’t know if she’ll ever walk again but I’m not settling for anything less than a fucking miracle. We are being pragmatic and making decisions moment to moment based on the best info we currently have but I will never settle for less than a miracle. There is absolutely a phenomenon that is born of consciousness and creates effects in matter. I’ve 100% seen miracles occur and I’ve never asked for anything, I’m asking for a miracle now. I’d be grateful if you took a moment to help me give my Daughter one. Everything I am is aimed towards the care and quality of life for my Daughter, to get her through this and help her to have a happy life. I thank you for this one thing of which I ask.
Update
Sept. 4
Update on Maisie Mae but first of all… WOW. I just don’t have the words. The outpouring of love and support have been colossal to say the least. The prayers, well wishes, meditations, incantations and good vibes are so strong that there is an ethereal but very tangible viscosity of love that surrounds Maisie Mae here in the ICU. The gofundme that was set up for Maisie’s recovery by my friends/ co-workers: the Hortons, the Teagues & my Sister Kristi has spread like wildfire. I can barely fucking look at it without crying. Every single person that’s contributed or even shared, everyone that has reached out to us in any way and/ or has broadcast healing thoughts for our Daughter: we are forever grateful & idk how I’ll ever be able to thank everyone. I’ve never felt anything like this before and Kristen, Maisie & her Brother are also feeling the love, like thousands of digital hands behind them lovingly holding them up
Maisie is still in a lot of pain and is very emotional about her situation. But through the pain is a strength that shines forth from her that is so white hot and intense that I have no doubt she will bend reality itself towards her will. She is so strong, even when she herself feels weak. She has a plate with 10 screws along her neck & upper spine in the back and tomorrow (Thursday) she’s getting surgery where they will go in from the front to shore up the other side of her spine.
Day 1 she could not feel below her mid breastbone. Each day she can feel a bit further and can feel herself being touched as far down as her belly button. She can feel the nurse squeeze her toes now and can slightly feel her shins being touched, we have a signal from the brain which is a great sign so whatever you all are doing out there I humbly implore you to keep up the momentum of prayers and well wishes for my little girl, we will all get her there
Every day at her request, despite the pain, they crane her into a wheelchair via a sling and she gets wheeled outside. Her friends and family visit daily which cheers her up immensely. Only some of the muscles in her arms are getting a signal and so she is moving her arms as much as she can to build up the muscles that are getting a signal in order to compensate for the ones which aren’t, she even seems to do it in her sleep, she is committed. She is very much wanting to regain use of her hands. Imagine any 18 year old who can’t use their phone, it’s a powerful motivation unto itself
Through the nightmarish devastation we find comfort in both the big and the small things. The fact that she is alive and very much herself. Always having been so independent and willful she is frustrated & pissed the fuck off, something that I feel will help get her through this. A kind word from a stranger, incredible Drs. & especially the nurses here who love her and cry with us daily. Our hearts are melting with this new perspective of love & humanity. I get an average of 9 eye rolls to 1 smile for every 10 Dad jokes I throw at Maisie but that 1 smile is like ambrosia to my soul. We are doing all the reasonable things but, with your help, demanding a miracle, for Miracle Maisie Mae.
Interview
Sept. 6
I hate interviews, but I agreed to this because I love Maisie so whatever it takes to get her more prayers, well wishes & support. Her surgery yesterday went very well. She got back to the ICU and a mere few hours later was doing physical therapy where they sit her upright, she did it without a single complaint. She has an incision scar on her throat. The Drs. said if she keeps it out of the sun the scar may fade. Maisie said she didn’t want it to fade because “it looks cool”. She is so my Daughter and such a bad ass. She is improving every day in both body and mind. My wife Kristen & I along with our whole family is beyond grateful for the continued support. She is indeed~ Miracle Maisie Mae.
Tragedy
Tragedy.
It stalks us in the night.
It skulks just out of sight.
It’s that thing, you know the one, that thing that only ever happens to someone else. Never to us, fuck no, not to us, to them,
always to them.
And when it does occur, (to them of course, always to them), we lament and are truly sorry and we wish we could help or fix or console.
But in that secret chamber behind our heart, the one which holds all of our un-tellable secrets, it whispers: “thank fucking god it’s not me, hallefuckinglujah its not mine.”
There are nightmares so terrible that upon awakening our heart grows wings and like a baby bird of gladness it takes clumsy flight and flutters within our breast for a brief time, reminding us: that it’s never us, never us,
it’s always them.
Then it comes.
The nightmare from which you cannot awaken. You certainly try because, you know, this shit doesn’t happen to us, only to them. THIS DOES NOT FUCKING HAPPEN TO ME OR TO MINE…
only to them.
You rage at the nightmare gnashing and screaming trying to awaken but all it does is blister your throat and bloody your knuckles.
You bargain. You suck the nightmares oppressive shroud into your soul in a tortuous but willing exchange to convince it to release your beloved back into the wakeful world.
(It should have been me.)
You try to resurrect the old gods but find that you have forgotten their names and can only assume that they, have forgotten you.
(Why can’t I wake up? WHY THE FUCK CAN I NOT WAKE UP)
You thought you paid your dues of suffering in this life. You thought you even overpaid, and perhaps you did. But nevertheless the collector comes for its 137 pounds of flesh, the flesh and hope of they, whom you love more than you love yourself.
From the darkness the truth emerges like a swift hammer and breaks the porcelain paradigm that delicately held your life and a lifetime of lost tears flow through its jagged cracks.
So many tears you just might drown… you want to drown, but you keep swimming. Not for yourself, no, never for yourself, but only for them. The “them” that is now “you”, and the “they” that is now “thine”.
Pain becomes your precious friend.
Because when the vulture of tragedy stops circling and begins consuming the hopeful future of your beloved, pain is the only thing that can decrease the distance and bring you closer to them. Because although you stand by their bedside, you watch helplessly from a thousand miles away.
The pain of which you welcome seems to be the only bond you are able to truly share; a circuit of similarity, a terrible chord strung from your heart to theirs as your beloved screams in wide eyed pain and terror, cries and whimpers in despair and you cannot even fucking hold them and even if you could, they wouldn’t feel it. Their ears cannot even hear your desperately chanted tearful consolations.
You don’t sleep, never sleep, because how the fuck can you sleep when you are already fucking dreaming never, ever, ever, to awaken again
ever……..
Tragedy.
Death’s scythe cleanly harvests, but tragedy is a blight upon the crop of happiness which withers all, with its terrible touch, that it may be tilled under to grow a new crop and a new and purified kind of happiness is born of its ashes.
The tragic immobilization of one sweet and determined soul can mobilize and awaken the hearts of thousands of conscious beings.
The darkest of earthly specters reciprocally attract the brightest of heavenly Seraphim.
The deepest shadow is a mere slave to the all pervasive illumination that hides in plain sight, behind our eyes, behind the misery of the mind’s vacillations
And within that unexpectedly exposed luminosity there is a sort of clarity. No longer do you wonder anymore. It all becomes perfectly clear.
You would burn down heaven with the fires of grief and inundate hell with a flood of tears for the sake of love, all the while vengeance threatens to consume you.
But you are restrained and restricted, by love, to a consoling whisper, the wiping of a tear or an oh so gentle touch upon a hot brow.
So thats what you do. Finally defeated you surrender to tragedy and find hitherto unimagined joys in the very tiniest of triumphs. Because that’s all there is.
Perhaps that’s all there ever was, but you were too busy before- blustering around being or doing or chasing something.
Never engaged in the small because you only ever sought out the big.
Missing the minutia of your own life even whilst living it.
Your fractured paradigm becomes single pointed in the same way that iron shavings all turn in unison towards a magnet. You make the appropriate decision to simply love above all else because your beloved is right here- right Now.
And “Now”, is a promise that gets broken if you seek it in yesterday’s shadow or follow it into a tomorrow that never comes.
We all must make the choice when it’s our turn; to harden our hearts and go cold or choose the tenderizing hammer of love.
Tragedy.
The pulsing electric lines and terrible metronomic beeps eventually merge into a kind of harmony and become soothing and telling notes of the hearts rhythm, blood pressure and oxygenation. An electronic symphony of life that reminds: they whom you love- is blessedly still here.
You realize that your bond of pain with your beloved must, for both your sakes, expire and evolve into a collaboration of simple shared joys in order to comply with the terrible and wonderful tyrant of duality whose crown is change.
Oh so tiny are they, these molecular moments. But when soaked in the hearts hot and hopeful blood they swell into behemoths and become bigger than life.
The “they” to whom tragedy always befalls has irrevocably become “you”.
You were just too busy before, chasing phantoms, to realize that “you”, were in fact,“them” all along.
The big becomes small and the small becomes big. Up becomes down and down becomes up on the roller coaster of tragedy. The ride of life in its most extreme iteration.
Before the Vulture spies you and descends…
and while crushing all the small things underfoot whilst chasing the “big”…
perhaps it’s worth contemplating:
What will you choose when
“they”
become
“you”?
We all take our turn in the end.
Our Girl
Sept. 9
Update on our girl Maisie Mae. And at this point when I say “our girl” I really do mean ALL of “our girl”. In her tragic immobilization she has mobilized the hearts of thousands… it’s truly a phenomenon.
Her 2nd surgery on Thursday went well. Today she is getting a pacemaker put in due to some accident related autonomic dysfunction. As you can see from the pic not only is she surrounded by oodles of digital love, she is also like a beautiful cloth covered boulder of strength and perseverance within a loving stream of perpetually flowing friends and family.
Her pain is lessening every day and she is regaining some sensation, very slowly but surely. She refuses pain meds on occasion because they cause extreme nausea. She cannot move her legs or fingers… yet. Her moods and emotions fluctuate, as they do. A nurse suggested to Maisie that she might want to start antidepressants but Maisie refused stating: “If I’m depressed I want to know it”. She is wise beyond her years.
We are doing our best to learn Snapchat so we can better help Maisie stay in comms with her friends. The poor thing… we are slow and clumsy about it and what 18 year old wants her Dad anywhere near her phone at all. Whatever it takes though, whatever it takes.
Maisie has been unable to have a productive cough due to the weak connection between brain and diaphragm. All those little throat clearings we all take for granted, she cannot do and the resulting build up creates a danger of pneumonia. Imagine having gurgling phlegm in your throat all damn day that you can’t get rid of. Respiratory is working hard with her. Sometimes they do what’s called a quad cough in which the nurses perform a sort of frontal heimlich timed with her cough. There are devices for her to blow into and also inhale with resistance to open her lungs and she pushes and pulls so hard with effort that her head vibrates. Maisie doesn’t fuck around.
I told her that if she can get her fingers to flip me off I’d buy her a car. (We’re gonna anyway, specially equipped for her needs) Kristen & I take turns, one of us sleeps next to Maisie in the ICU and the other goes to the hotel and balls. I think it’s healthy though. Maisie makes fun of me because when she calls my name in the night I shoot out of the chair, tangled in the thin hospital blanket, eyes stuck shut and stumbling over like a zombie. A sight both horrific and comic.
I won’t lie this is fucking hard but I don’t spend much time on it because what we are going through is nothing compared to her. We are entirely focused on our girl. Such a roller coaster, truly. We’re doing our very best to keep Maisie’s chin up and encouraging her to feel all the feels, that’s the way.
Idk how long we’ll be in the ICU but it doesn’t matter. We are home wherever Maisie is, or will be. I’ll never be able to appropriately thank all of you out there enough for supporting our girl with loads of well wishes, prayers, advice, support and for also sharing or contributing to her gofundme that my Sister and some dear friends set up. Have you seen it lately? It’s like WTF!? (Link below, no pressure just check out the love)
We humbly ask that whosoever feels the inclination that you continue the momentum of well wishes and prayers and all the things. It’s a marathon not a race. Our hearts swell with your support. Toodles for now
Dedicated to Miracle Maisie Mae
Toodaloo
