And the pirate jokes continue! My mom still has her patch, but she also had a visit from the eye doctor today. Fortunately, her vision issue is fairly common among brain injury patients. Unfortunately, however, this type of double vision can take a very long time to heal (several months), and if it doesn't heal, it may require surgery. We'll just have to wait and see how it goes. Luckily, my mom sports the patch well.
My mom had an early morning today when, first thing, she was put in a harness and made to walk on the treadmill on and off for an hour. It was spectacular to watch her standing upright, and although she required some help to keep the correct posture and to take big and proper steps, she looked absolutely fantastic. Her physical therapist, Laura, had her walking for 5 minutes at a time, and toward the end of the hour, my mom got very exhausted. She would all of a sudden start a countdown, hoping that the machine would stop when she reached zero. At one point, my mom also misunderstood, and thought that she only had to walk for 2 minutes instead of for 5. After approximately 2 minutes, she started telling us that the clock was messed up and that Laura was a liar. She had us cracking up, but it's still too soon for her to see the humor in it just yet!
We don't say very much about speech therapy, but my mom has it twice every day, and we all love her speech therapist, Emily. Today during speech therapy, I felt like I understood what my mom's high school peers must have thought about her back in the day. Emily brought my mom a whole stack of worksheets, all with pretty complex activities on them, and my mom blew through every single one in less than 20 minutes (speech is supposed to last a full 30 mins). Emily explained that she always tries to keep my mom's chart stocked with plenty of tasks, but that she can't keep up and she had completely run out of work for today. My mom gave Emily the OK to end the session early, but I couldn't help thinking to myself, "what a smarty pants!"
I feel like I say this almost every day, but my mom was very herself today. She asked if we could watch tv or a movie, so we decided to watch tv in the family room down the hall for a change of scenery. We watched a few "Friends" episodes together and we spent a lot of time just talking during the commercials. Again, I know I've said this before, but for a significant part of this afternoon, I felt like it was just me and my mom - the way we were before all of this. John spent a lot of time with us this evening, too, and it's such a joy to interact with each other so casually. It's definitely a long ways off, but I know that the day will come when we can finally say that this nightmare is behind us and that we've come out the other side.
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