January 4, 2006 - Mid-Morning

It was another busy day in Amanda land yesterday. She had a busy day of group neuropsychology, one-on-one neuropsychology, OT, and 2 sessions of PT (she has one in the morning and one in the afternoon). They also did a calorie count assessment. In order to remove the feeding tube, she must be eating sufficient calories orally and be able to swallow pills. The calorie count is one of the checks they do to determine if she's ready for the tube to be removed. We don't have feedback on that yet. (Although Kurt was able to eat all of her meals with her yesterday and he said that she did a great job. And if you've seen the hospital food, you know that's pretty impressive.)

For her afternoon PT, she worked with Joann (Joann does the best job motivating her) and she actually walked around the room without the walker. Joann helped support/balance her from behind, but she did the hard work herself from what we coudl tell. She also rode the bicycle for the first time. We were very impressed to see her put in a whole six minutes! In OT, they gave her some more challenging activities and that seemed to encourage her a bit more. She bounced the ball with Kevin and lifted some barbells from her shoulder to her head about 3 times. We didn't attend her speech therapy session with her, but Mandy did read the name plaque outside the door: "Cabal" (That's her speech therapist's name. When Mandy heard it last week, she looked at the therapist, nodded and said, "wierd".) Today, her therapist responded to her reading the name off the plaque,"Yes, my name is Cabal." Mandy looked back at her and said,"Yes, I can see that on your monitor." They have the weekly update meeting with all of the therapists today, so we hope to be able to report tomorrow that she'll be able to get a pass this weekend. Fingers and toes are crossed!

Her hair cut has been rescheduled for today; so we're excited to see what new 'do Ladonna is going to create for our girl. She also had visitors from each of the potential group homes that she'll go to next come today to assess her current skill level (they do an early assesment to help determine which program level she would go into). The release date is still scheduled for the 3rd week in January.

And of course, the Mandy spirit is still fighing strong. When Kurt saw her in the evening, he asked her how her day was. Her answer was short and sweet,"It sucked." That's the girl we all know and love.