Friday August 10 by John

Well today finished off my mom's first week of therapy, and it seems to be both exhausting and beneficial.  Over the weekend there won't be as much therapy, so she'll get a bit of a break.

Yesterday night some people brought around three dogs to visit, which my mom clearly enjoyed thoroughly.  She spent some time petting a small furry one and then a black lab performed some tricks for her.  We're all dog people, so we all had a really great time.  They come by every Thursday, so we're looking forward to seeing them again next week.

I've gotten a couple questions about whether she's still in a coma.  While I'm certainly not an expert and haven't had a doctor's opinion on the subject, I think it's safe to say that she doesn't really fall under the category of "coma" anymore.  She would probably score very high on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which we've reference before, but it's not really a very useful measure of her degree of consciousness at this point.  She has many periods throughout the day of talking to us, and she's improving daily, but there's still a rather long road ahead of us.  She still dabbles in talking in numbers and sometimes gets fixated on certain words/phrases.  Every day it seems like she manages to stay focused and have more meaningful interactions just a little more than the day before.  Today she did better than yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow will be better than today.

John