We took our first walk tonight around our neighborhood with Claire since we’ve been back. Claire watched the sky and flowers while Heidi, Autumn and Esther ran through the sprinklers. We enjoyed getting out of the house and watching Claire observe her familiar surroundings. It was a nice cap off to the weekend.
Claire has settled down a lot since she got home. She wasn’t able to fall asleep at the hospital while any activity was occurring in her room: that has changed at home. Claire has fallen asleep twice in the living room while we were playing games or watching movies. She has been much more calm and collected, spending significant parts of the day just watching and observing us and her surroundings. She is also sleeping very well. Claire fell asleep last night at 8:30 PM and woke up at 8:00 AM. She didn’t wake up at all in the night and had an easy morning with plenty of time to wake up.
We’ve spent a lot of time breaking in our new therapy equipment with Claire. We like the new toys and how they enable us to work her out. Claire doesn’t share our enthusiasm. She has been doing well with her sessions, however, she still doesn’t care for the exercise monotony and strain. Despite her dislike for the work, she continues to work hard. She is showing more improvement and flexibility along with decreased rigidity. We are excited to see how well she does at her new therapy sessions.
Those sessions begin on Tuesday. We solidified our outpatient therapy schedule on Friday. Claire will be doing therapy three times a week for one and a half to two hours a day. One of the sessions will include pool therapy since we saw such great results while we were at OCH. This week will give us the opportunity to meet Claire’s new rehabilitation team. We are eager to grow our support group and have them meet Claire. We’re excited for this next step.
We continue to educate ourselves and plan for Claire’s recovery. We are reading the Glenn Doman book that one of the commenters recommended and are planning to use it as a template to develop Claire’s at home rehab program. We believe that Claire is able to bear more intense therapy than the professionals are able to predict: we’re with Claire all day every day and see her more alert than he doctors do. Her outpatient caregivers may not see her at her optimal time and we want to make sure that we’re being as proactive and aggressive with her care to maximize her recovery. We will be discussing this with her new therapists and soliciting their insight on Doman’s methods.
It’s been a busy weekend. We are getting glimpses of what our new routine will be like, and still trying to recover from the energy depletion the last eight weeks. We thank everyone for the support and thank you for your continued prayers and hopes. I will continue to update the blog on a daily basis and hope big changes are coming in the next few weeks and months.