Transitioning

Hello everyone, just wanted to update for Nicole.  She finally got her custom foot brace!  We had been (and still are)  doing therapy with Nicole as per her team.  Because of liability issues, they didn't want to risk breaking her ankle as it's severely dropped.  The custom brace can be slowly adjusted to bring her foot back up while providing protection as she does her exercises.

Her progress has been slow but steady.  She can now easily lean forward in her chair and almost reach down to the floor!  Her speech is still very much a struggle but we aren't giving up nor is she...

Wanted to thank Linda Agostini and her colleagues at Magna for their generous donations from having a jeans day at work.  Nicole is very grateful that people out there care so much and she thanks everyone again for the love and prayers.

With Love to you all,

Nicole and Chris

Big thanks!

I just wanted to thank my cousin Jen Place for her time and effort in helping Nicole's cause.  She was able to raise $750!!  We are lucky to have such a caring cousin...  Thanks to those who attended and donated:

Dr. Danna Haba
Judy Place
Josephine David
Vicki Bounassar
Debbie Majkowski
Ed and Jennie David
Nikki Freitag
Rae Anne Kapler
Nicole Silarski
Staff of Excel Institute of Shelby

Even though Nicole is on a short hiatus from professional therapy, we continue to make sure she is doing some occupational or speech therapy every day.  We are waiting for a $1000 brace for Nicoles foot son she can move into the next phase of OT and PT.

Again, to those of you who donated in the past, thank you thank you thank you.  I'm sorry if anyone was upset that I didn't send out personal thank you notes.  If anyone knows me, I think I suffer from a little ADHD and tasks like that aren't exactly in my wheelhouse.  Please know that however I truly appreciate every single one of your donations and care.  We couldn't be doing this with out you and I know Nicole is also very grateful.

Looking forward to posting updates as she makes breakthroughs.  Right now, it's the grind of repetetive tasks and she us making progress albeit slow...

God Bless,

Chris

Slight Change of Plans

Just wanted to update Nicole's situation:  She's doing pretty well overall except for the obvious.  My Mom and I made the decision (as per her therapy team) to hold off on her therapy until she gets a proper foot brace.  She can't do any physical therapy (working from the waist down, leg strength) until she gets a custom foot/ankle brace to protect her fragile ankle on her now bad side (her right side).  In addition, as per her speech therapist A.J., he recommended we do the speech therapy work with her ourselves as she's hit a soft wall where it's not justifiable to pay a therapist for things that we can do for her until she progresses.  In other words, we feel that the money will be better spent on things that we can't or unable to do i.e. physical therapy (focusing on trying to get her to be able to get around on her own and standing).  We have a folder of speech therapy exercises and it's really just a matter of repetition and getting her to practice remembering objects and trying to annunciate them.  There is no sense spending the $75 per session for something we can do on our own.  As for the occupational therapy, my Mom has been working with her on her core strength and hand eye coordination with instruction from Anu, her awesome OT lady. 

I wish I could write and say that she's making this incredible rapid progress but I'm afraid that's not how this is going to work.  It's going to be a long slow road back to even close to where she was before.  With that said, we will be saving the funds for when she's ready to take the next step (literally) and hopefully it will come soon as her brace arrives.

She did get approved by Medicare to get a new wheelchair thankfully. She was using a house chair that wasn't very comfortable and the new one will allow her to tilt back and hopefully have better support for her legs/feet.

I never thought I'd be doing speech therapy with her but we try and make it fun.  My Aunt Shelly was working on speech with her yesterday and got a good belly laugh out of her as she was trying to imitate a chimpanzee!  Words like that are extremely difficult for her to annunciate as she has no control of the right side of her mouth and I believe her tongue.  It's amazing how much you need your tongue to speak!

Anyway, she's still a trooper as always.  I don't know what i would do if i were in her situation and its always on my mind how she is "trapped" inside her own body not to mention that nursing home.

I truly hope better days are ahead.  Until then, its just one at a time...

Thanks for your concern,

Chris