The Stapleton Family

Greetings and Salutations Faithful Stapleton Blog Readers

Well it’s been another eventful week here at the Stapleton Mansion.  There have been no further domestic injuries to report.  Petey is healed up and Rick continues to be on the mend.

In other great news Jess’s CT scan came back negative; they did not find any hemorrhaging on her brain.  However she is still experiencing increased headaches and occasional extremely sharp pains in her head, so I remain concerned.  She is going to therapy everyday and is slowly beginning to have less and less pain; but the path she has to follow is still very long.  She is also becoming a little stir crazy and increasingly stressed.  Monday will begin her 4^th week off from work and she is concerned about her families.  If you add that to the fact that she really has not been anywhere but doctors appointments over the past three weeks you can begin to imagine how she feels.  Fortunately her professors at school are working with her so that this entire semester does not have to be scrapped.  So far work has been understanding, and has just asked her for a written leave request and the doctor’s excuses for her personnel file. (Which having been a manager I can fully understand)

I may not be a doctor but I think it is going to be a good six weeks from the date of the wreck before she is ready to go anywhere and that will still be in a limited fashion.  She just can not move, sit, or stand for any long periods of time.  Some other great news that I got this week is that my Nebraska trip has been postponed!  I was supposed to fly out today and not return until the 22^nd.  Now I will just have to leave next week for a few days to do some work over in the DC area.  So as you can imagine I am thrilled that I can be close to home to take care of Jess and handle things.

Monday, I am going to have to start seeing what can be done do to get this claim moving a little faster.  I called the body shop last Tuesday to see when Jess’s car might be ready only to find out that additional damage was found and it still might have to be totaled.  As of Thursday the adjuster still had not returned to check the car again.  We are entering the fourth and last week of our rental coverage so something is going to have to be decided soon.  Also the claims guy at my insurance company is indicating that AVIS has not been returning his calls.  So I think that a little personal visit to the AVIS booth at Yeager airport might be in order to move this issue along.  If you do not recall the Yeager Airport AVIS location is where the cruise missile was launched from that impacted my wife.  If they total the car that’s fine we are in an excellent equity position.  I just don’t think Jess is going to be in any shape to go car shopping any time soon.  That could pose a problem since she would need to pick out a car fairly quickly because the rental will have to be returned.  Even though she is going only about 2 miles round trip to therapy she still needs a vehicle to get there because I am out so much.

So enough about the wreck and Jess lets talk about me.  This week I had a lot of day trips doing customer visits with my boss.  Then I spent Thursday & Friday in Cleveland working with another customer.  You know I never ever seem to get to go south for my business travel!  Weather was not too big of an issue and I was able to get home about 10:00 on Friday night.  I received a call from Willie last night to let us know that his wife Sharon is going in for some surgery at the end of the week.  Not knowing how much they want to make public I will just ask that you keeps them in your prayers.

On a personal note I have to report the death of a very close and personal friend.  On Sunday night shortly after my last blog post my Logitech wireless keyboard died.  After several attempts to revive it there was nothing anyone could do.  Just so you know having to shop for a new keyboard is about my least favorite thing to do.  I work out of a home office using a KVM switch, so I use the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor for at least a good 12 hours a day.  So getting a new keyboard is like having to pick a second skin and has to be done correctly.  So I made all the rounds and looked at keyboards ranging from $10 to $200 and just could not find anything that I liked.  The feel on some of these new keyboards is just horrible.  As depression kicked in I swung by the new Mac shop in Best Buy.  It was there that I found possibly the best keyboard ever designed to date.  It was the Apple keyboard that they use for their iMac product line.  It’s made of aluminum and is extremely sturdy and comfortable to type on.  I had to go back to having a wired keyboard but for the feel and comfort I do not mind.  I strongly recommend trying one out.  It rocks!

That’s about all the interesting news from the Stapleton Mansion for this week Good night and God Bless.

Greeting and Salutations Faithful Stapleton Blog Readers!

Just wanted to drop a quick note and let everyone know how Jess is doing.  She continues to steadily improve but is still experiencing quite a bit of pain.  Her official diagnosis is “whiplash with flexion and extension” or if you want to think of it another way she hyper extended around the seatbelt.  In short she hurts a lot and is experiencing some pretty severe headaches.  She suffered from migraines before the accident but not of this magnitude and regularity.  So just to make sure that everything is really ok she is going for a CT scan tomorrow, just to make sure that nothing was missed with the two sets of x-rays she has already had.  She continues to have daily therapy to ease the pain and regain some mobility.

Our current level of luck continued into last week, I had to go out of town a few days and Jess did pretty ok by herself.  Her mom and step-father were nice enough to drop off some groceries and when they did there was a minor accident.  Her step-father Rick slipped on the ice in our drive way; fell and broke 3 ribs in the process.  Our drive way suffered no apparent or immediate injury.  He was also nice enough to not charge us for the snow angel art he made in the driveway.

Rick had to be taken to the ER in an ambulance for assessment.  That was about 6:00 on Thursday night when I was supposed to be coming home.  However with the snowstorm in Elkins and my on site project not going too well I decided to stay in the area one more night.  Later Thursday night I get a call that Petey fell on our steps going down to the basement and was now limping around the house.  After this the cat (the only fully functional member of my household) was calling my cell phone requesting an emergency extraction.

That’s where we stand now, we hope to have Jess’s test results back on Wednesday so that we can evaluate where we need to go with her treatment.

Please keep her in you prayers and I will try to keep everyone alive.

Greeting and Salutations Faithful Stapleton Blog Readers!

Well it’s a week after the wreck and Jess is moving better but is still no where near being well. (In fact she even gave her flying monkeys another week off) We went to another Doctor today and he took several more x-rays and started Jess on some therapy. He also took her off work for another week which just stresses her out, that in addition to the fact that she was supposed to start back to school last Tuesday. Tomorrow we should have some more findings to help develop a course of action to get Jess back into fighting trim.

She continues to be in a lot of pain and discomfort. A little prayer in our general direction would not be turned away. Starting tomorrow I am back on the road and have a lot of windshield time coming up. This will be a mixture of overnights and day trips. The next 60 days will be the busiest period of travel since I joined the company 3 years ago. Needless to say a lot is going on at the Stapleton Mansion.

For those of you who are asking Jake what happened to the car? Well my estimating abilities remain in good standing; I only missed the amount by about $150. The total damage is a little over $6800.00, hopefully the car was moved down to Graley’s this afternoon to undergo surgery.

That’s it for this update good night folks!