Good news ~ I found a wireless internet connection around here so I can post from Randy's room. Hopefully it remains there. It makes it kind of nice to be able to post during the day and not have to wait until I get home.
Saturdays are suppose to be half days of training. I was expecting an hour, maybe an hour and a half of sessions. Per the printed schedule, Randy had 2 hours of therapy and then during lunch time, the speech therapist wrote in another hour for her evalution, so he had a full 3 hour day today. He didn't mind at all. I think he likes it because he is determined to get better and it gives him something to do during the day.
The first half hour session was the usual getting dressed. Randy did quite well with it today. The therapist he had today had him sit in a chair and that seemed to be better than the bed because when he would start to lose his balance, he would have the chair arms right there to help him regain it.
The second half hour session was with physical therapy. That therapist worked with his walking. Today, she had him start with a single based cane. He did pretty well with it ~ occassionally he would lean to the left too much and use her too much. Then she had him try a walked so that he had to work with his left arm. It was a little difficult for him, but he says he prefers the walker because of the working with that arm. He did pretty well with the walker when he would go slow enough.
Then Randy had an hour session of occupational therapy. She worked with stretching his left arm ~ she believes the pain Randy is feeling in that arm is all muscular from not using the arm for so long. She also had him fill out a paper where he had to write the date, his address and his age. He did okay with it. He left some numbers out of the date, such as the 0 for 06 in the year. For the address, he put our address at 21st street instead of 261st street. He got his age right. Then she asked for his home telephone number and he gave the number from before we bought our house (it will be 3 years ago at the end of August that we bought the house). I explained to her that he and I don't use our home phone number so she asked him for his cell #. He gave her mine. He finally did get his cell number ~ he knew the area code and I just gave him the first number in the prefix and he could fill in the rest. Then she gave him a phone and asked him to dial my cell # and he dialed my work number. But upon asking him again, he was able to dial correctly. She then asked him what number he would dial if there was an emergency and he gave my cell number. But after a little prompting, he got 911. She then gave him the yellow pages and asked him to find a dentist. He seemed a little confused and finally said "This should be an internet query" (he and I don't even use our phone book). He was finally able to find a dentist. Then she had him draw a clock. That didn't go so well. He couldn't fill in the numbers. She finally drew a clock for him and asked him to draw the hands for 9 o'clock. He was able to draw the small hand to the 9 but didn't know how to draw the secondary line. She then worked with money again. He did great with naming the coins and counting up their value, but with giving change, he struggled.
Then, the last hour was with speech doing an evaluation. Randy got very frustrated throughout this session. They evaluated his memory, listening, and attention skills. They started by giving him 2 shapes (squares and circles) that came in 2 different sizes and 5 colors each, so 20 pieces altogether. He did great at following her directions until she started making the requests a little more complicated with things such as "Touch the red circle instead of the blue square" ~ he would touch both of them. She also told him a short story and asked him to repeat it. He didn't do so well with that. He did pretty well when she gave him numbers and he had to do the opposite sequence from what she gave him (for example, she would say 361 and he was to repeat 163). He started having issues when it reached 4 numbers. He also had issues when he was given a letter and given 1 minute to come up with as many words that started with that letter as possible with the rules that it couldn't be proper names. She gave him the letter "C" and he got one word, and then got stuck on Cassandra, which of course was against the rules and that frustrated him. She then gave him a category of animals, but instead of naming different types of animals, he started naming off the names of our animals. Then she gave him pictures of things and asked him to name it and that whole process frustrated him. Simple things such as house weren't coming to him, but more complicated things such as stethoscope came right away. At the end of the session, she asked Randy what he did and she said they would work on trying to get him back to that point if possible but she warned him that he might not be able to return to that point again. This session was the first time since last week I have seen some of the deficiencies he currently has, other than the phsycial ones that are obvious.
Next Wed, after his whole team of therapists meet together, we should get a better idea of where they think he is at and where they think he can get to and how long they think he should stay here in rehab.
When the speech therapist came to grab us today (we hadn't done speech yet so she came to grab us to show us the way), she asked Randy how he was doing and he said he could really use some ice cream. At Harborview, that was the typical dessert and they also had a yogurt machine in the cafeteria that we would often bring him. So far here, he hasn't had ice cream, but they do keep some in the freezer. He ended up eating 3 of those little containers and then his dad went to Dairy Queen and got him more.
I also let Randy see some pictures of his car after the accident, both at the scene and the ones from the car insurance. I wasn't sure how he would take it, but he wanted to see them. He commented that "they crunched my little Saab" and then when he saw the one where they are cutting the top off, he said it was a "new convertible style". I showed him pictures from the Blog of how he looked towards the beginning and how he looked now so he could see the huge difference. He really seemed to do quite well with the whole thing.
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