It’s almost Friday! Yay! Thank you for extending your prayers to our darlin’ Lindsay last night. It turns out she didnt have a stroke and they are still working on figuring out where the symptoms came from, but she is doing better today and they are hopeful she will make a full recovery. Were still sending so much love her way. Mom had a very busy day today. Seriously, the busiest. She made some sizable leaps forward. Two days ago they had done a “swallow test” with some thickened gooey orange juice that they dyed blue. They dye the things they feed her blue so that they can see where they go in her body (to make sure that food/liquid is heading to the right places). She doesn’t really like orange juice and also was probably pretty unsure about the whole bright-blue-sour-gooey liquid ordeal. Needless to say, it didn’t go well an she spit it out each time. Today, however, they tried vanilla yogurt on my dads recommendation. Even though it was still dyed blue, it was the perfect consistency/taste and sure enough she ate the whole thing! They didn’t detect any aspiration and her swallowing function worked just fine, which is really great. Along with successfully passing the food swallowing test, Mom also went outside today. That was awesome for obvious reasons but she wasn’t extremely happy about it because she was uncomfortable. She doesn’t like the crash helmet she has to wear when she is out of bed- It really hurts her head. She started crying and told my dad it really hurt, then she asked what happened to her. My dad said that was really hard to see/hear but that he gave her a little explanation of what happened and told her that she had surgery on her head but that now she was doing really well. Then they took the helmet off and everything was okay. We are looking into getting the padding inside of it changed to something softer to see if that will help. The downside of the day didn’t have anything to do with her progress. She just had a LOT of drama going on with her neighbor, who got extremely volatile and loud and started throwing things. It was completely crazy and mom was really scared and sad but then a parade of staff members came in and took the neighbor out of the room entirely so the rest of the afternoon was very peaceful. I headed over with Mary around the time everything had settled, and we sat with her and quizzed her while Dad went to lunch. It seems like her response rate is much better when there are less people in the room and she can focus. I started asking her to spell things, and that was sort of a breakthrough. She was spelling almost everything I asked her to. I asked her where her favorite house is and she said “Big River” (where our family vacationed for 20+ years, and still goes) and when I asked her if she was sure it wasn’t Havasu she said, “No, Big River”. I asked her to spell the dogs names, our names, her own name. When I asked her to spell mine she hesitated, then later when I was leaving and I was giving her a kiss goodbye she said “I know how to spell your name, I made it up” which I thought was very funny. Some of her words are clearer or louder than others, but we are working on encouraging her to speak out above a whisper. Either way, she is making such phenomenal progress! A nurse who had met her for the first time today asked me what happened to her as she took her blood pressure. I told her she had a stroke, then I clarified it was about 5 weeks ago. She said she has worked with a lot of stroke patients, and that her progress was definitely way above most peoples at that point. We have heard this over and over again, even from people who don’t know the severity of her stroke. She is a miracle, and we pray she will continue to heal and move forward daily, with no setbacks. She’s amazingly strong and we look forward to the day we can bring her home. I think that’s enough info for one night, but I love love you all! Thank you always for your prayers and support. Extra XO’s KK
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 04:26:14 +0000
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