Thursday, May 29, 2008

Today was a great day in lots of ways. First, Mark did great in all the therapies again. The pool therapy was especially good. Mark's legs were completely straight and he was not "pretzel man" as he and the therapists have joked about. He was able to get both legs straight and kicking while supporting himself with noodles. It was great and Rich got to see it too.

Then he went to the Erigo and did very well on that again today. Yesterday's PT was on a special treadmill called a Loca-Mat (or something close to that) and he really did well. Everyone is very thrilled with his progress in these areas.

We had our conversation with the neurophysicologists today. They completed their first testing and evaluations on Mark and basically, he is doing much better than anyone expected. His problem solving skills, language, long-term memory, and speech are all in the average range, which is good. He was probably in the high above average range prior to the accident so this was very encouraging. He did have some deficits in the short term memory area, which everyone expected since that is the area of the brain that was most affected. He will probably have this issue for the rest of his life, but that's not to say it won't improve over the next few years. They are also teaching him how to adjust his life skills to compensate for this problem and he is getting better at that as well. Overall, we were very optimistic that these disabilities will be liveable.

There was other good news today on the floor. Our friend Anthony, who is AJ's dad and Ivonne's husband, actually ate ice cream for the speech therapist. He was able to eat and swallow it well and opened his mouth in anticipation for more. This is a wonderful step for him since he has not done this for the entire time he has been here which is coming up to a year. We were delighted for him, and Ivonne.

These are the days that make all of us happy.