Where is Everyone?

It's been a while since anyone's posted on here. Where are you all?

Lezlee is scheduled for surgery on January 26th. It is very frustrating that it's taking this long for her surgery. In the meantime she's stuck in a wheel chair, unable to walk. She does get around a bit on her crutches but since she can't put any weight on her right leg, it makes balance difficult and she's had a few falls. Friday she fell in the closet and banged her leg up pretty good. She was stuck on the floor and couldn't figure out how to get up while it was hurting so bad so she ended up organizing all our shoes until she felt better.

The surgery will take the Achilles tendon from a donor (read dead guy) and string it through a hole drilled from her tibia up through the middle of her knee and into her femur. It will be held in place by a screw and a staple. This will replace her torn ACL. She should recover quickly from this surgery. Because she is getting donor tissue instead of using her ham string, the recovery is a lot shorter and so she will be able to put weight on it almost right away and be cleared to walk in about two weeks.

The wild card is the other damage to her knee. The fracture should heal on it own so they won't do anything with that. The MCL will probably heal with physical therapy and so they don't expect to do anything with that during the surgery unless they find its hurt a lot worse than they think. But they don't know how bad the injury is the meniscus. The Meniscus is like the shock absorbers for the knee. If the damage isn't too bad, it will eventually heal itself. But if its torn up pretty good then they have to stitch it back together. If that happens she won't be able to put any weight on her leg for six weeks. And we won't know which it will be until the day of the surgery.

It is sad that this happened but we sure had a lot of fun snowmobiling up until then. Here are some pictures of that fun and finally a picture of Lezlee getting wheeled into the ambulance for the 90 mile trip to Rexburg and the world's most incompetent doctors.



Lezlee and Jordan near Mosquitoe Gulch.




Three moose on the Ashton Hill--eagle-eye Brennan spotted them.





Near Two Top.



Brennan is somewhere under all that padding.



Amazingly Lezlee was not injured while Jordan was driving.


At Warm Springs.


This is why we love West Yellowstone in the winter.

Lezlee about to be dropped by her rescuers who didn't know how to work the gurney.


Noelle in front of Sawtell.

In painting news, one of my paintings--Roxanne--was selected to appear in Scottsdale Magazine as the only painting shown under the gallery section. We actually didn't know it had been selected until Lezlee picked up a copy at the doctor's office and was flipping through it and saw the painting. Very excited. She also was writing a check the other day and when the person helping her saw the names on the check he asked, "Are you married to Kirk Hays the artist?" Lezlee said yes and the guy said he'd seen my work at Art One and I was one of his favorite artists. He then described a bunch of my paintings to her. That was pretty cool.

Jordan got back the other day from Catalina Island but she wants to do her own post about that.

Kirk