Another Day at Rehab

Randy continues to get better everyday! Today, when walking with the physical therapist, she was barely hanging on to him. His balance has gotten so much better. The one area he still has a hard time with is turning corners. She had him practice walking around cones (as you can see in the picture) to work on turning. Today in physical therapy, he also practiced walking up the stairs and he did excellent at it with the use of a rail. She didn't have to really help him at all ~ she just stayed behind him to spot him in case he were to lose his balance. In another session of physical therapy today, he also worked on how to get up in case he were to fall.

In occupational therapy, they had him shave while standing to work on bearing weight on his left hand. In his second session, that therapist had him work with his left hand. She had him remove pegs from a board and then put them back all with just his left hand. He did quite well, but you could tell it was a lot of work for him.

Speech class is Randy's favorite class. He loves working his brain. In the first session, that therapist read Randy paragraphs and then had him repeat what the paragraph was about. He did quite well with the short paragraphs, but struggled with the ones that had more facts in them. So, if given too many facts at a time, Randy's brain goes in overload. He has always been someone that takes notes, though, because his memory even before the accident wasn't the greatest. In the second session, that therapist let Randy takes notes while she read a paragraph and went onto another exercise and came back to the paragraph 15 minutes later and asked Randy a bunch of questions about it. He did very well with that, but needs some practice as note taking because he was trying to write down far too much information. Both of the speech therapists commended Randy on his use of the planner they gave him. He uses it to know which class is next and he does a great job of writing down who he saw for what class and what he did. He even took notes about how his memory couldn't handle large amount of facts at a time and his need to write things down to better retain. it is so great that he has the awareness that his memory is bad and he is actively using tools to help him work through that deficit.

Tomorrow, Randy's group of therapists and doctor will meet again and should have an updated estimate of when he can get out of here. I love the amount of therapy he is getting as an inpatient and the inpatient therapists are great ~ I have been so impressed by them.