Moving Forward

It's awesome how much progress Nicole has made in the 3 weeks that she's been doing her therapy!  I was gone for the weekend and didn't see her for 4 days and happy to say that she can now lean forward in her wheelchair!  She wasn't able to do this prior to me leaving and I'm so proud of her!  She's also been working on standing up longer each time with less and less help from her PT person which is awesome :)  The speech is still a struggle but her speech therapist AJ is excellent and I have the utmost confidence that he's going to get everything that he can out of what she has left in her lower left lobe and hopefully start getting the right side of her brain to start compensating for what she's lost.

I am so grateful that she has the chance to improve...

I'm also so grateful to my Mom who has been participating in just about every session while dealing with her affairs after losing Rich not to mention fighting her own battle with breast cancer.  She is an incredible lady and an awesome Mom is all I can say.  Not sure what we would do without her...  I'm also grateful for my family contributing what they can when they can. My Aunt Shelly has been working with her on the iPad and Anu (her occupational therapist) told me it's making an impact.  I also wanted to thank my cousin Jen who has been so helpful not only behind the scenes with me but lending her expertise in optometry evaluating Nicole's vision and putting a plan together to make some improvements with custom lenses/eyeglasses.  Her vision ever since the stroke is poor for close up objects and her range has been severely diminished...  It's so important that we all work with her trying to take back some of what she's lost.  If anyone is interested in participating in working with her on some of this stuff, she loves to practice when she's not too tired.  It's going to take all of us who care for Nicole participating as she has a long way to go...

I'm cautiously optimistic that things will continue to improve as we go forward through this process and look forward to reporting progress as it happens :)

Thanks again for your interest and following her story!

Cheers,

Chris