January 18, 2006 - Early Morning

It may be a cloudy day over much of the country, but we have lots of great news that is a little bit of proverbial sunshine. At 5 PM last night, they removed the IV from Mandy's arm and for the first time in 3 months, she is free of tubes, holes, bags, needles or any other medical apparatus. Free at last, free at last! For the first time since she's been capable of independent movement, she even went to sleep unrestrained last night. This should all clear the way for a short pass this weekend. We're hoping that Kurt will be able to take her home for a few hours of quiet time amongst her own things. Keep your fingers crossed!

They did push her release date back to January 26th. We were actually hoping for this, so this is a good thing. She lost a week of good therapy time while she was sick and we really wanted her to be able to make it up. Although we're anxious to get her home, we've seen the results and benefits from the therapy and we want her to get as much of it as she's able to handle and insurance will pay for. So we're happy about the extra week.

Her neurosurgeon stopped by yesterday and examined her while Dacia was having breakfast with her. He says that she's doing great and he doesn't think he needs to see her again unless she runs into any problems. What great news! Her only other "physical" problem remaining at this point is the ankle that keeps hurting her. She's scheduled to see a specialist this afternoon as the rest of her team is at a loss as to what's going on. So other than that ankle, it looks like we should be able to primarily focus on strengthening her physically and focus hard on rehabing her cognition and speech.

And in line with all this good news, she had a great day yesterday. She was alert and "on her game". She attempted to help with the removal of the IV last night (peeling off the tape, swabbing the area with the alcohol). She enjoyed looking at some catalogs with TAnn last night (like any woman, she always seems to enjoy that!) and commented "That's beautiful!" or "That's blue -" (which was correct). TAnn feels that she's making more connections then she has been making. When she was looking at some groceries she commented,"Wow, that's a lot" and then she said,"I cook -" to which TAnn responded,"Yes, you're the best". Her cognitive skills definitely seem to continue to improve (especially now that she seems to be over the worst of that pancreatitis) and we're looking forward to everything the next week holds for us.