I got up early this morning and sorted through some of the clothes here and carried various things into Nancy. Two T-shirts were among the things and as I took them out of the bag Nancy remarked that one was an XL and the other an XXL, and she was right. Still, she hasn’t been in street clothes since November 27. Okay, so the stuff wasn’t new but she looked like a new person.
The therapy crew got her dressed and she spent 3 to 4 hours doing occupational, speech, and physical therapy. Some of the time was spent just answering questions and making base-line assessments but she did quite a bit from a wheelchair and briefly stood between parallel bars – standing, moving forward and backward, and moving muscles that hadn’t been moved in 8 weeks.
She got a powered bed and can now raise and lower the entire platform and/or tilt the foot or head areas.
She had several visitors including a couple of young friends that because of age restrictions are not allowed in the local hospitals. (Coughs, colds and the swine flu scare even caused the local hospital to remove all the magazines and booklets from the waiting rooms.) But the rehabilitation center expects visitors and seeing old friends (well, young friends) again was a nice surprise.
And in the mail today came a plastic card – densely printed with information. It came from the company that supplied Nancy’s new heart valve and it has all the relevant stuff a medical specialist might want to know about it – including the name of the surgeon that stitched it in. Like other important cards it is to be carried with you. For the wallet, more stuff. And in this case, it is new.