First Jess and I met in the room with the Occupational Therapist, and he showed us all different ways and gadgets for Jess to use to help with bathing and dressing. Then we went down to the physical therapy room and he had Jess do a bunch of exercises for upper body strength.
He also gave him a big strip of stretchy latex to use for more upper body exercises, and showed him how to do them all.
After that, it was back to the room for a session with the nurse about all the different medications Jess is on. Some of them are meds he’s been on a long time. The only thing really different is the pain pills (Lorcet), sleeping pill (Resteril), and the shot of Lovenox sub-q in his stomach to control blood clots. Since I already know how to give sub-q shots that didn’t amount to much. (But you should have seen the face Jess was making when the nurse said HE could learn to do the shots!)
Then back down to meet with the Physical Therapist. She also had a list of exercises for Jess to do at home and checked him out again on how well he could do them. A couple of them really test his ‘intestinal fortitude’ when it’s time for some major knee bending.
Our last session was with a Case Manager. She mostly double checked we had the equipment needed, and where Jess wanted to go for his physical therapy on an outpatient basis after he is discharged from Health South Rehab.
Jess also had his first “Stair Master” session today, practicing going up and down steps.
And he’s getting more adept at getting himself around in a wheelchair too.
Of course, here he's just resting in-between bouts of stomping up and down the stairs.
By the time we got through all the “education sessions”, we had quite a stack of paperwork. Between the rehab papers and the paperwork from the Joint Camp with before and after surgery do’s and don’ts, it’s a pretty fat folder of papers!
The staff has a meeting tomorrow with all the doctors, nurses, therapists, and case managers involved, and along with double checking what the insurance allows, after that we should know exactly when his discharge date will be.
We’re hoping no later than Friday. That will be a week here, and to stay 10 days would mean over the weekend. They only do a little therapy Saturday morning, and absolutely none on Sunday, so it would be pretty much a waste of time to keep him over the weekend then send him home on Monday, just to say he’s been here 10 days instead of 7 or 8 days (depending on how they’re counting).
And we are soooooo ready to go home.
But we look around at some of the other people here with strokes, amputations, spinal cord injuries, etc., and we think a lot about kids like Ellie who are doing therapy on a long term basis, and realize as hard as this is for Jess, we’re still pretty blessed. There’s a whole lot of people that have it a whole lot worse. Barring major disaster, his knees should pretty steadily improve from here on out.
And that's pretty good news.
0 comments:
Post a Comment