July 5th-7th

As an army wife there are two contingencies that you make peace with while your husband is deployed, one is that he'll come home at the end of the deployment and life will go on, the other is that he won't come home at all. Getting hurt and having a life altering injury never even occurred to me.
Kirby called me at about 5 in the evening. My friend Emily, whose husband is also a company commander in the battalion, was over and we were watching the Twilight movies. Kirby was very heavily medicated and at first I almost thought it was a joke. I couldn't quite wrap my head around the words he was saying and when I finally understood I thought he was calling to say good-bye. He told me that he had gotten blown up by an IED and was hurt real bad, he said his back was broken. I didn't know what that meant, I didn't think you could come back from a broken back. He said he could wiggle his toes and that nothing had happened to his spinal cord. He said he would be in Landstuhl (the big army hospital hub in Germany) tomorrow and asked me to call his parents and let them know. It was a pretty short call but it was the worst moment of my life. The not knowing what exactly happened and what I could do was the worst part. The next couple days were a blur of phone calls and plans and emotions. I was talking on my cell phone and house phone almost non-stop. Finally on Wednesday, which seemed like an eternity but was only 48 hours later, we loaded the kids, my neighbor Nicole, myself and Spc. Mix(the soldier tasked with driving the car up and helping us get there) in the flex and drove the 12 hours to Landstuhl. I sat in the back seat wedged between the two car seats, holding the boys' hands and was finally able to relax a little knowing in a few hours I would see Kirby.