2012 04 04 Wednesday April 4

Post date: Apr 4, 2012 9:05:09 PM

We haven't been posting much lately, though as regular readers know Martha has been progressing extremely well. A few days ago Dr. Smith finally heard back from Dr. Krisht, who had reviewed the CT scan. The brain shunt is apparently keeping the pressure under control as it should, and while occasional headaches and nausea are to be expected after brain surgery, it's especially good that Martha has been having fewer episodes and they aren't accompanied by worrisome symptoms.

Today, Martha says, she got to walk outside the building. She got to traverse damp sidewalk and grassy terrain, and did just fine. The only time she used her rollator for this exercise was to ascend and descend a very small step (curb height). They want her to keep using the rollator to ascend and descend for safety reasons, but starting tomorrow she will be encouraged to get up and down on her own and walk to and from areas in the rehab facility. She has been using the oxygen less, but they are going to recommend that she continues to have it available as needed.

Martha is doing really well cognitively, too. When I was with her today, she actually remembered the church's phone number, but hadn't been able to get through. I watched her dial, and the problem was she was accidentally pressing the wrong button for one of the digits. Once she corrected that, the call went through and she was able to arrange her Holy Week communion with her pastor. She still gets a bit time disoriented, so I delivered a watch Amanda ordered for her to wear, hoping it might help with time orientation. (The watch shows the time, day, month, year, and day of week. It also sets itself so she doesn't have to worry about daylight savings time or whatever. I hope Martha doesn't need to read the instruction manual, since it took me quite awhile to figure out how to "encourage" the watch to set itself to Daylight Savings Time.) :-P

The really big news today is that Martha has a discharge date set now! She and I met today with the physical therapy staff, and they tentatively set April 14th, a week from next Saturday, as the big day. The PT and/or OT staff will accompany her for a visit to her home early next week so we can look for potential problems and still have a few days to correct them and/or train her for them. They will arrange some level of home health visits, including review of her medications as well as home physical, occupational and speech therapy. As we were leaving the meeting, Martha asked how soon she might be cleared to drive. The rehab staff wasn't at all sure. They said the person to evaluate her for driving would be Dr. Krisht.

[For folks wanting an update on Amanda, things are much the same since last week. She completely stopped her old medication early last week and this week is finally no longer feeling the ill effects from it. She is very slowly increasing her dosage of the new medication, but her doctor doesn't expect it to have things better under control for another month yet. We had another sample of that today, when she and I were discussing how to handle her medical leave paperwork, and just that discussion caused her to have trouble. SO I will have to figure out how to file the next round of forms for her.]