Mr Funny Man

Randy has been asking me a lot lately if he seems any different. He says, to him, he feels the same, but he thinks he sounds different. His voice is a little monotone, but that is very common with head injuries. However, he is definitely the same Randy! His sense of humor has definitely remained intact. In one of his speech classes today (with the same therapist who didn't get his joke about reindeer living in the North Pole) was reading him paragraphs and Randy's task was to say why the paragraph couldn't be true. One paragraph she read was about a farmer in Iowa who was claiming to have amazing fertilizer that made vegetables grow 10 times bigger than normal. The fertilizer was made from meteor dust. Within the paragraph, no name was given for the farmer, but upon her finishing reading it, Randy made some comment about the farmer, calling him Mr. Kent. The therapist looked at him very confused and she looked at the paragraph again then asked Randy who Mr Kent was. Randy responded "Clark Kent's father". It isn't as funny explaining it now because I am not adequately describing it, but being there, it was quite humorous. The fact that he would make that correlation and do it so quickly really amazed me.

Also, throughout speech, the therapist worked a lot on memory recall. She read a paragraph and asked Randy a series of questions about the paragraph. He did excellent today ~ so much better than before. She also read paragraphs and had Randy give the topic of the paragraph with being given 3 different choices. He did pretty well with that too. She then gave him the beginning of various sayings and he had to finish them. He got almost all of them right. One that he didn't quite get was "There's more than one way..." Randy couldn't think of the word "cat" so he finished the sentence with "to skin a snake". At least it was somewhat close! The last thing she did with him today was to ask questions and he had to think of objects that fit into them. One was "What can be green or red". For this, I would have answered "apples" or "Christmas lights". Randy's answer was "leotards". I am not quite sure where that answer came from!

In physical therapy, they continued to practice his walking and worked on balance and stairs. For occupational therapy, they worked on his left arm. They had him stretching it as seen in the picture. They also had him work on a machine where he had to turn a wheel and the therapist had him do it with his left hand. Another therapist had Randy stand at a table where she had written different amounts and poured out a bunch of change. Randy had to use his left hand and on the amounts, he had to put the correct amount of change. He did very well with this.

Randy is so excited about getting out of here. When I told him that the tentative date is the 24th, he went to his planner and put a smiley face on that date. He wants to be home. I am really glad they want to do in-home therapy for a bit before starting outpatient. Randy doesn't like to be in cars right now because, with his vision issues, he gets a little car sick. It will be nice for him to get to do things around the house.