Thursday and Friday Update

July 10 & 11
By Karen

The first 2 full days at the rehab hospital have been very busy. Doreen is kept moving by the therapists and nursing staff – sometimes without her enthusiasm (to put it mildly). She has been scheduled for 1 hour of each kind of therapy (speech, occupational and physical) each day. Sometimes these sessions include leaving the room to go to the gym or to a therapy room, while other times they remain in her room to complete the set tasks. The staff also tries to get Mom out of bed other times, if possible – for example, to the cafeteria for a meal. She is no longer allowed to merely lie around to recover. She is now expected to be an active participant in her own healing process.

Doreen participates in the therapy pretty well for about half an hour at a time. When the therapists have attempted to hold hour-long sessions, she often becomes too tired to cooperate after the first half hour. She even falls asleep mid-sentence or in the middle of a set of exercises! She rests quite a bit in between the sessions. This indicates that she is working hard, but it also results in fewer opportunities for conversation and interaction with us (as compared to when we were in the hospital). This can leave Dad and me feeling like things are not moving forward, because our interactions with her have decreased. However, we continue to remind ourselves that the progress she is making now occurs as a result of the deliberate exercises within the therapy sessions rather than in our communication with her. We feel confident that she is in the right program and facility and that her progress, while agonizingly slow, will continue.

Doreen still has quite a bit of difficulty eating – in other words, she’s still not eating anything. Therefore, she is now receiving nutrition through an IV. It provides her with the calories, vitamins and minerals she needs. This is a great relief to us. (We discovered on Thursday that she had lost about 22 pounds since this adventure began.) Being tethered to an IV pole inhibits her mobility, but the trade off is worth it.

The neurologist who is now overseeing Mom’s care (Dr. Jody Neer) has indicated that he wants to address the vision/balance issue and the food intake/nutrition challenge before pushing too hard in therapy. He recognizes that these are foundational issues that we must solve in order for her to gain the strength and basic skill she needs to move forward with rigorous therapeutic efforts. We appreciate his approach and continue to watch for signs of improvement in these basic areas. Her course of antibiotics will be complete tomorrow (Saturday). This should help reduce some of the possible side effects (tin-like taste in the mouth, upset stomach, bowel irritation) that may be hampering her energy level and ability to eat. We hope to see improvement in these areas in a few days.

Mom continues to show quite a bit of confusion at times. As an example, we received a call from a rehab nurse Friday morning as we were traveling to Ft. Wayne. She told us that Mom had fallen out of bed during the night Thursday. Luckily, she was not injured in any way. She got her feet slung over the side of the bed and then pulled on the side rail enough to shift her weight in a way that caused her to slide off the bed onto her bottom. She ended in a sitting position up against the bed. There was an alarm on Mom’s bed that immediately alerted the staff of the situation. When they arrived in her room, she told them that she was sure that it was her brother Jay’s birthday and she needed to get up to check the calendar to confirm this idea. (Yes, July 11 is Jay’s birthday. We had talked about that during the day on Thursday when we were discussing the July 10 birthdays of several people who are close to Mom – Jessica and Hoa, for example.) The fall, of course, was distressing news to us. It was not all that surprising, because we have seen the confusion that leads to this behavior. However, the rehab staff indicated they would have someone sitting in Mom’s room overnight to help prevent this kind of incident. We were told there was a “sitter” in Mom’s room on Wednesday night, but they had seen nothing that caused them any concern, so they did not have a “sitter” on Thursday night. As you can imagine, there will a “sitter” in Mom’s room each night again until it is determined that she is no longer at risk.

We will continue to update the blog every few days, but we may not post an entry every day. The level of activity is such that we are kept quite busy along with Mom. Thanks for your continued love and support!