St. George Trip

The weekend in St George with Cambria and Ron was a blast as usual. This was one of my favorite St. George trips. One reason was because Chris just had surgery on his hand, he wasn't able to golf at all, so I got to spend every day with him! (Sorry Chris…:) ) Another reason is this amazing hike that we went on at the Emerald Pools in Zion's National Park. We were led astray by something Chris read saying that the hike was stroller friendly. That was true for about half of the hike. So we ended up packing Mia and the stroller the rest of the way up. We got a lot of weird looks and I'm sure more than one person concluded that we were a bunch of bozos, but we had a blast and I'm so glad we did it!

There were deer grazing just feet from us off the side of the trail. Too bad Mia couldn't appreciate how cool this was :)

A few years ago Chris got sent home from his mission for surgery on his shoulder related to a high school basketball injury.  After a few months of being home for physical therapy and recovering from the surgery, his shoulder got cleared and he was ready to go back to England. He decided to celebrate by playing some basketball the night his shoulder got cleared. During the basketball game, he ended up injuring his right thumb pretty bad. The ligament in his thumb had been torn off his bone. He had surgery on the thumb to reattach his ligament, and only a few days later was back on a plane to England. Unfortunately his thumb was never given an opportunity to heal properly while he was trying to finish his mission. His casted hand went from swelling, to turning purple, to developing a nasty rash. Health care regulations in England kept him from being seen by a doctor there.  This, along with other medical concerns, led to the medical release that cut his mission short. 

Chris' thumb never fully recovered. This January, while playing basketball (surprise!), he knicked his thumb just right again. The ligament broke, again. 

Chris was stuck wearing this brace for a few weeks before he was able to get in for surgery.

This time, instead of surgically reattaching Chris' ligament, a cadaver ligament was used to fix the problem, and Chris' broken ligament was removed. This is supposed to be a much stronger and long lasting option. Let's hope so because although Chris is supposedly "sworn off basketball"…it's Chris. I think we've had enough injuries and surgeries to last us a lifetime.