Saturday update

by Linda

Doreen was newly curious today for an extended conversation with lots
of give and take. This was reassuring after the steps that felt either
backward or, at best, sideways. She has asked a few things before but
she started this morning asking a series of questions, one after
another, in a logical progression toward understanding "what happened
with my head." Time frames are very foggy and hard for her to put
together but she is working and thinking and trying to process the
situation a lot of the time now. She pulls some things from memory and
some things from the present and seems to combine them logically some
times and quite creatively other times. She was able to participate in
a conversation that was downright chatty with her brother Jay. She
spoke for 8-10 minutes with the telephone resting on her pillow. Her
speech was a bit slow and thick but she was on target. After she has
exerted herself like that, she hibernates for hours.

Eating continues to be a huge undertaking. She chose spaghetti today, a
challenge for her helpers to balance the wiggly stuff on the fork, as
she quite adeptly uses the fork to feed herself. It just simply takes a
long time. She waits to decide which food she wants for each bite,
chews slowly and deliberately, asks for sips of drinks, closes her eyes
for a bit, asks why she doesn't have Parmesan cheese or garlic bread,
and then LOVED the taste and texture of her dessert of cheesecake but
needed to have us hunt down some hot peppermint tea to have with it! It
was actually heartwarming to have that opinionated determination
surface again.

Tag---Judy's it. She is coming Sunday afternoon again as Linda and
Parker need to return to Illinois tonight. We are strongly encouraging
Carl to attend the morning church service in North Manchester with the
desire to return to some semblance of normal routines.