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