February 24, 2006 - Early Morning

Mandy continues to remind us of the little engine that could. We had the meeting with CNS yesterday and what was scheduled to take about an hour and a half took over 2! We had a list of questions going in and we made sure that we went over all of them with her team. The quick outcome of the meeting is that she is still on track for a normal release time from CNS to an outpatient program in 3-4 months. (Since she went in at the end of January, that would put her release time around May). Of course, that's subject to her status and progress as we get closer.

This was the baseline meeting where the team established what her current deficits are and what the plan is to help her overcome them. The 2 biggest problem areas continue to be the cognitive deficits and the "pain" she is perceiving in her left foot. [And yes, we hate the word "deficits" too. But that is the accurate medical term and an accurate description for right now.] The "pain" in her foot really slows down her progress overall and affects all of her treatments. We're happy to report that her physical therapists are being proactive and thinking outside of the box in looking for ways to help her get over this hurdle (having her put lotion on her foot, having her put a weight on the ankle as she's walking to force her to use it and get used to the pressure). Although we'll meet with CNS on a monthly basis to discuss status, she is still improving on a weekly basis which is exactly what we'd like to see. (She had already made some of last week's reports obsolete).

Of course, she continues to be cute as all get out. She goes on weekly field trips to the grocery store, restaurants (Boston Market this week) and the movies. She's even humming to herself again. When Kurt stopped by earlier this week for the morning visit to get her day started, she looked up at him from her bed and without prompting and told him that "I feel good". That's exactly what we want to hear.

Although we would have also liked to have had CNS tell us in the meeting yesterday what functions we can expect Mandy to recover, it's not really possible with a brian injury. No one can hazard a guess at this point as to what point she'll ultimately heal to. The general rule of thumb is that you must get to 12 months post trauma before you can make those kinds of assessments. In the meantime, we just give as much therapy as she can handle and surround her with love and encouragement.

P.S. For anyone that would like to learn more about Brain Injury, we've found a website that we think is a pretty good one. [March is brain injury awareness month!] It is the Brain Injury Association of America (http://www.biausa.org/Pages/home.html) and is chock full of information about brain injuries. One of the items that we particularly enjoyed was some of the poetry written by individuals with TBI (years after the trauma) about their experiences and what they were feeling. It's hard right now for Mandy to express everything that's going on inside her because of the speech challenges and the poetry gives us insight into the types of things that may be going on in her head during those times when she isn't able to share it with us herself.