Slow and Steady

Our girl continues to fight the good fight and I continue to do my best to knock the obstacles out of her way. She has made significant physical recovery over the last few weeks and shows continuous; albeit slow, mental gains as well.

Judi continues to grow stronger physically on all fronts.

She is beginning to recover significant strength in her neck and holds her head up for longer and longer periods of time. I know she is tired of hearing me tell her to hold her head up and I am afraid I am going to rub off her eyebrows with the constant "help" in holding up her head. I know that she understands that I am only trying to help, but she still puts the "stink eye" on me at times when she just wants to be left alone. I am confident we will win this battle, but it is going to be a long process.

Her left side continues to grow stronger at a fairly significant pace. She is regaining control of the motion in her left leg and when standing is very comfortable carrying weight on it as well. The more weight bearing activities we can do with her, the more control the brain recovers of the leg. I think all of us are becoming more and more confident that she will be able to walk again based on the response we see. Her left arm is going to require a lot of work, but she is starting to regain control of it as well. The issue here is the significant loss of muscle that has occurred during the time since her accident. We remain positive here as well, but there are sure to be some challenges in front of us.

We are trying to restore her back strength as well. I believe this is going to be our major physical challenge once we get the neck restored. One of the things we are doing to restore her normal posture is to get her out of the wheelchair as much as possible. This also has a lot of psychological impacts as well. She has taken ownership of my recliner and we try to get her in it anytime we can. She spends several hours each day sitting in it as opposed to sitting in a wheelchair and it is clearly making a difference. I came home the other day and she looked like the "Queen of Sheba" sitting there in my chair. When I gave her a hug and kiss she wrapped her hand around my head and gave me a big hug back. I'll admit that tears of joy have been few and far between of late, but I can't describe how impactive these seemingly simple things are on my ability to keep on going.

Speech therapy continues to show slow results. Judi has all the physical pieces, but is still struggling to execute everything in the proper sequence to clearly form words. We are focusing a lot of our effort in this area. We continue to believe it will just time and there is nothing that indicates she won't ultimately succeed.

Her awareness level continues to improve. She enjoys watching TV (especially America's Funniest Home Videos) and looking at magazines while you read to her. I can't tell if she is trying to read it as well. We will continue to try and have her write and respond to words that we write down. It is difficult to tell if she understands or not, but we continue to expose her to it. Writing still eludes her, but I can't tell if it is an eye/hand coordination issue, mental limitation or a combination of the two. Her yes/no responses are improving. She has periods where she will actively participate and is usually 100% then. These are still very limited windows and the majority of the time she just won't commit one way or the other. We continue to work with her and reinforce that there are no wrong answers. This is still a very significant improvement from where she was just a month ago and indicates that she has the ability.

The leg continues to cause both of us a great deal of issues. I have figured out how to minimize the duration of the attacks and she is fighting hard to control them as well. We are exploring several treatment strategies. As always, the complicating factor is not implementing a strategy that impacts the brain stimulation we are trying so hard to promote. More to follow as our direction becomes clear.

As I mentioned in the last post, we started Judi on an anti-seizure medication to see if it would improve her mental status. The first medication kicked her butt and I had to take her off of it. We have subsequently started her on a different medication and she seems to be tolerating it well. We will have to monitor her response once the medicine level builds up to the appropriate levels in her system. The EEG results were abnormal in some areas on the right side of her brain (which we expected) and showed nothing abnormal on the left side. EEGs are "hit and miss" as far as seizure activity goes. None was detected while she was being monitored, but that is only a 30 minute snapshot. At least now we have a baseline to monitor her against.

My biggest problem right now is that Judi has caught the "crud" that is going around. She was spiking a pretty high fever for a couple of days, but that seems to be under control. Now we are dealing with the congestion, cough and (I suspect) sore throat. These would typically be relatively easy to manage, but in her condition each presents a challenge of its own.

Please keep us in your prayers as we take on these new challenges. Judi loves to have visitors and if anyone would like to drop by we would be tickled to have you. She has a busy schedule, but we can always work around it. Just drop me an e-mail (swilk@knology.net) or give us a call (706) 855-6940 if you would like to see her.

Steve