A quiet day today with Donna. She continues to improve in small ways and
her speech seems to be the showcase item today.
While she still has a good way to go, the priceless moment was when the
respiratory tech decided to give her a treatment (she doesn’t like the mask)
and the nurse and aide decided to move and adjust her (which involved a roll)
at the same time, that she chose to say rather boldly “Tell them to leave me
alone”. All were stunned and the
pregnant pause was broken by Donna repeating “ Tell to leave me alone” just in
case anyone felt it was a fluke. All
were pretty thrilled to hear her and all worked quickly to comply; a rare
moment of unhappiness from our girl who has been so willing to comply with all. Later this evening she got my attention and
grabbed my shoulder and said “up” and proceeded to try and pull herself up to a
sitting position. She didn’t quite get
there, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
All ways in which she seeks to reveal herself and we find it thrilling.
The therapy staff here takes the weekend off so with a
blessing received yesterday, John and I took it into our own hands to get her
up on the side of the bed on our own today.
We were pretty fired up to do it and it went pretty well. We knew we weren’t quite up to the standard
of the professionals but it was a great effort and Donna kept her hand into
doing well.
I have to say that the engineers feel a bit humbled thinking
about how we have been trying to verbally communicate with Donna for a while and
never thought to just ask Donna to nod or shake her head. It took all of a few minutes for the speech
therapist to carry on a conversation with her yesterday that way. Still feel kind of silly. I bet that speech therapist would have a hard
time designing a separation vessel! Despite
being slow to that party we have jumped on that bandwagon and gotten some great
answers today.
Steady as she goes here.
Regards
Bob
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