Mandy has been a busy woman since our last update! Every day shows some improvements both cognitively and physically. Although the pain showed a bell curve after the second block (an immediate decrease, a gradual increase and recently, tapering reduction), her pain level on the whole is much lower than it was prior to the first treatment. In fact, she is using the wheelchair with much less frequency and utilizing her walker and pole in it's place. She's even (sometimes unexpectedly!) walking on her own. After settling her into the house this weekend, Kurt returned to the car to unpack some items and bring them back into the house. Upon re-entering the house, he saw Mandy's walker in the kitchen with Mandy no where near it. He found her on her way upstairs. We guess she decided that she didn't need any extra help after all to make the walk from the kitchen, through the living room and up the stairs. Mandy is slowly becoming mobile again, watch out world!
As well, we have an update from Christine and her Thursday with Amanda last week, and from Dacia/Chris and their time with her this weekend. (The blog picture accompanies their narrative).
From Christine:"Thursday was a very low-key day, as Amanda was a bit tired from staying up late the night before. Plus she didn’t have time scheduled with most of her usual therapists, so she wasn’t quite so talkative.
For OT, at 9a.m., she cooked stir-fry. Amanda did all the prep work, dicing veggies very precisely, etc. It turned out wonderful and we enjoyed it for lunch! During this hour, she did complain quite a bit, but was still willing to finish the task. Her foot is still giving her pain, so this is understandable. It has been 3 weeks since her last Lumbar Block, which does make a huge difference.
A new “progress” that I’d like to report, is that Amanda no longer has a RA sit with her through lunch. She is independent enough to be left alone, only checked on occasionally.
I was driving my brother’s truck today. Mandy said, “I’ve always thought his truck was beautiful. I can’t wait to ride in it. It was so nice of Sean to let us ride in his truck! We should call him as soon as we get in to thank him.” Of course, she called him to tell him how grateful she was:) Her positive, complimentary nature is unbeatable!
For dinner, Kurt took us girls out to a new (to us) restaurant called the Kasbah Grill, Authentic Moroccan Cuisine. The food was fabulous! Mandy was very stingy with her hummus, not wanting to give more than a tiny bit to Kurt! Her started out sitting close to her, on her left side. She warned him, “If you f- up my leg, I will kill you.” Of course this was while the waiter was putting some food on our table right between them. His expression was funny!"
And from Dacia, "Last fall Amanda and I talked about doing some scrapbooking together while Kurt and Chris brewed beer. This weekend we finally got to do just that! Kurt & Amanda, and my brother Toby, all came over early Sunday morning for brewing & scrapbooking. Mandy and I sat outside and drank coffee while the guys started their brewing, and then we moved inside once it started to get hot. I had a stack of photos that I took last October when we went on a camping trip to Pedernales Park in the Texas Hill Country and I asked her if she’d like to work on some scrapbook pages with those pictures. First we looked at all of the pictures and talked about what we did that weekend and who all was there. She recognized David Z. and his dog, Berlin, her cousin Alan W. and her friend Rene. The most amazing thing happened next: Amanda immediately picked out three pictures that went together, told me what color of paper that she needed and then started working. She told me, “I need some of those little tabs to stick the pictures down,” without any reference to them from me. This was good as she was recalling recalling a specific scrapbooking item that she hadn't used since before the accident. We spent about three hours doing this and she put together 7 nice pages with hardly any help from me at all. She had definite ideas about she wanted to do with certain pictures, told me the colors of paper and pens that she needed and wrote some very good captions underneath the photos. During this time, we had the most coherent conversations that we’ve had since the accident.
The only reason we stopped was it was time to eat lunch. Amanda made a nice salad, cutting vegetables without help, and sampling the tomatoes, avocados and herbs along the way. She told me she could hardly wait to eat because the salad looked so good.
After lunch all five of us went out to the pool and spent a couple hours out there. Mandy’s humor was in full force and she joked with all of us and enjoyed playing with some of the pool toys. Chris noted that Amanda's sense of humor has gotten quite acute these days, and that in many ways it is more and more like before the fall. She jokes quite a bit, often laughing at her own statements, and sometimes she's so subtle that she fools us. When Chris was carrying in a carboy of beer they had just brewed, Amanda said, 'I'd sure like to have a glass of that.' Chris said, 'it's not ready yet, it has to ferment,' to which Amanda replied, 'I know that, I was just kidding.' When one of the cats came back from the litter box, Mandy made a little string of jokes about cats pooping, and even made up a word to call the cat. She said the cat was 'Insh_table,' which was quite funny, being a pun of 'insatiable' combined with the S-word, and then she laughed profusely. But this is also a very cool development, as Mandy and several of her friends used to enjoy making up fake, humorous words on the fly as they were having a casual conversation, and Mandy was always quite good at creating these puns. Hopefully, we'll see more of them, and we think this, as well as her scrapbooking experience, are signs that she has made a few more steps to getting back to her old self."
Mandy had another busy week. Her third lumbar block went very well and her pain has been much improved all week. The family meeting is scheduled for this Thursday and we think we might have reason to believe that we'll be discussing a go-home date at the conference. It's probably a couple months away and she'll still be in daily therapy, but we're all pretty excited at the thought of Mandy being ready and able to sleep in her own bed every night!
