Today was relatively low key, as therapy is usually only on the weekday agenda; however, my mom did receive a visit from physical therapy first thing this morning, followed shortly thereafter by speech therapy. During PT, we stood my mom up 2 times. It wasn't exactly a smooth operation, but as we learned with our first attempts at sitting, it's never too early to start trying. Transporting my mom and standing her up are particularly difficult right now because my mom is still non-weight bearing on her left leg. Therefore, we have to hold her left leg to stop her from pushing off of it, and it's not exactly fair to judge her ability to stand when she can only be one-footed. When speech therapy came soon after PT, my mom was a little worn out. She still did very good, but was a little less spunky than she was yesterday. Some of the things they do in speech therapy, for example, go something like this:
"Donna, what do you write with?" ..."a pen."
"What do you tell time with?" ..."a clock."
"If your husband was cutting down a tree and it fell on a power line, why would that be bad?" ..."it would kill the power."
"Good, why else? What would happen if your husband touched it" ..."it would hurt him."
"Yes, so who would he call?" ..."me."
"Ok, and who would you call?" ..."the power company."
As you can imagine, these sessions make us very proud of her.
We get a lot of questions from the staff here about my mom's profession due to her constant talk of math. Apparently numbers aren't the most common crutch words used when a person first wakes up from a coma....they say that cuss words are far more popular. We're not exactly shocked that numbers come more easily to my mom than cuss words. Nevertheless, the therapists have started training us, and we've been told that we need to not support the use of math as a word filler. Another common word from my mom is "help." At first, this was extremely anxiety provoking for us, as we desperately wanted to help her immediately. We learned that help was not always needed, however, and we had to stop doting on her when we were unable to find a way in which she truly needed help.
Something particularly funny that my mom said today was when she was shown an old picture of my dad among other old pictures of me from when I was a baby. My dad showed the picture to her and said something like, "Donna, I looked good huh?!" Despite being rather sleepy at the time, she said to him without missing a beat, "Yeah, 27 years ago." Everyone just sat in silence for a second as they tried to do the math in their head. I'm obviously giving away my age here, but she was dead on! It was a picture from 27 years ago. We thought it was hilarious.
Shortly after my mom's speech therapy session, she had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic that she was given. It was caught very quickly, but we had to give her Benadryl and it knocked her out for a huge chunk of the afternoon. I think the sleep she got was good for her, and we're glad that therapy hadn't been planned for this afternoon anyway, but we missed being able to talk with her more.
Now that the medicine has worn off a little, my mom has waken up a bit - on and off. It's just me and her tonight - my last night in town for a little while. She squeezed my hand tightly as we said a few prayers together. My mom was able to say most of the Hail Mary with me, but she kept asking me to repeat the Our Father. After we had said it about 3 times, she became very frustrated with the fact that she could not say it with me. We talked about how it's a long and difficult prayer, but I assured her that it will come back to her soon, as she was already saying some of the words with me. During this very clear time of understanding for her, I listed just a few of the many, many blessings that we have all received during this time. She listened closely and nodded. There have been scary and painful days for us all, and there are many more to come. But God has been so good to us.
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