July 15, 2006
Ah, Saturday. Day of only one therapy session. This Saturday, Gary’s session was run by the woman who’d said the next time she saw him she wanted to see that he could lift his head off the mat and that his rolls had improved. He was ready for her. But before he got to show this off, she set him other tasks. First came one of his favorite exercises ;-) : fifty depression lifts using the pushup blocks. At least they were the kind where his legs dangled off the edge of the mat. The therapist had to oversee other people at the same time as Gary (so I guess that’s the standard Saturday situation), so she waited until I returned from his room with his grabber (for a later task) before starting him on the lifts. She went off, and I knelt behind Gary while he did the lifts to make sure he didn’t fall backwards onto the mat and hurt his head.
After that, she gave him balancing exercises, me aiding him while she went to the mat next to us to help another person. For these exercises, I stood in front of Gary and he reached out and touched my hand with one of his hands, his other hand either behind him on the mat or on his knee. We first started with my hand directly in front of him, then to one side – eye height, higher, lower – then to the other side in various positions, so he had to cross his hand over his body, which was actually the easiest kind of touches. He started out very wobbly – which set off my vertigo, but I didn’t tell him that; it was an interesting experience (not one I particularly recommend ;-)) watching him wobble around like a weighted chicken’s egg while I myself felt like I was on a rolling ship. After we did it a while, he got smoother at it, able to slowly reach out his hand and touch mine in a controlled manner instead of starting to slowly reach out then batting at my hand hoping he’d hit it before he had to catch himself from falling. He said it was unbelievable how tiring these exercises were, due to how much concentration they demanded; he said he knew they looked simple, but they certainly were not. The PT came over and told him that the purpose of the exercises was for him to learn what he needed to do to keep his balance, to learn to reach as far as he could, but also to learn just how far he could reach, and where, before he would topple – everyone has such a maximum reach, but at the same time it wouldn’t be good for him to limit himself unnecessarily.
After that, his task was to get his shoes off. But the new grabber was too heavy and big for him to manipulate it to get the velcro undone, and even after I’d undone the velcro for him, he couldn’t push the grabber into his shoe and get it off. So, he will have to work on this problem, perhaps by using a lighter grabber while he's in the sitting position or by taking his shoes off when he is already lying in bed and not beforehand (unfortunately, taking his shoes off after he gets into bed presents the problem of getting his feet onto the bed with his shoes on – the friction of the shoes against the surface of the bed mattress makes it hard to get his feet up by himself). The PT had the excellent suggestion that he should think about what he wants his routine at home to be like, and then to try to go through the steps of the routine here and see if he runs into any problems that could be worked on these next weeks.
She next wanted us to run through his stretching exercises. That first involved him lying on the mat on his back, properly padded off with pillows. She asked to see him raise his head so she could put a pillow under it. He did so. She cheered because he hadn’t been able to lift his head off the mat two weeks ago. She then taught him the routine she goes through with her four-year-old daughter when some goal is achieved: first they did a high five, then touched their fists together in a “rock” (as in the game “rock, paper, scissors”), then they raised their hands in inward-facing fists and pumped downward at the elbows, yelling, “Yes!” She told him she hated to tell him but her four-year-old looked much cuter when she did it.
She then had us do his stretches. She tsked at his lack of flexibility when we got to the last exercise, the hamstring stretch where I kneel next to him and raise his leg while he is on his back (he pulls on the chain loop wrapped around his foot in order to support some of his weight). She showed me another way to get more stretch on that exercise by kneeling next to him, keeping my arms straight – one at his heel, the other below his knee – and leaning forward. She did it on him first. Gary’s eyes got round, and he asked if she should really be stretching him that far, saying that if he could feel, he was sure that would hurt. She assured him she wasn’t over-stretching him, but I’m not sure he was convinced. She said he needed to work up to a 110 degree angle on the stretch, and he couldn’t even do a 90 yet. Gary said we’d work up to it, but he didn’t want to do that all in one day!
After that she wanted to see his rolls from his back to his side, and they went through another “Yes!” routine when he showed off how he could do them now. He told her that her tips had been in large part responsible for his improvement, but she refused to take the credit. She gave us both hugs when she found out that he wouldn’t be an inpatient in two weeks, so that this was likely the last time she’d see him. She told him it was on account of people like him that she stayed at this job. She had been the person who had done his PT eval when he’d first come in on May 17th, those tests to see what and where he could and couldn’t feel. She recalled that he’d been barely able to sit at the time, and now he was well on the road to independence.
After that came the lunchtime routine. Joe called and gave us an update on the house. He mentioned that he’d had time (or rather, made time) to modify the kitchen sink access so that there would be no obstruction to Gary rolling under it. Joe had lined the sides and the back edge under the sink with wood, so everything was “neatified.” He was hoping the tile guy would come some time today and tile the floor under the sink to match the other tiles in the kitchen. Other updates were that the shades for the various rooms should be arriving next Thursday (on Jo Heath’s watch ;-)), that Sylvia would feed the cats, and that he’d had to do a little conniving to get the dumpster people to do as they’d said they’d do and remove the dumpster today. Joe had also put a second coat of paint on both bathrooms and installed some of the fixtures.
He also mentioned that our poor kitties have been freaked out these past few days because of all the various workers – no surprise to us. He said he’s spent time trying to calm them down at night, especially Blackjack. He observed that they would probably be very unhappy kitties after he left because they wouldn’t be getting the day in and day out attention he’d been able to give them in our absence. :-(
I turned the phone over to Gary, as Joe might not be able to stop into Shepherd tomorrow to say goodbye. Gary told Joe that what he’d done had been truly amazing and that we’d be forever grateful. Tears came to Gary as he said that, but I doubt Joe noticed.
A little later in the afternoon, Gary decided he needed to do laundry. He asked me if I’d help by looking into the washer to see if there were any clothes in it and later by putting the clothes into the dryer, since it would take me two seconds to do something that it would take him ten minutes to do. I asked him if he was sure he didn’t want to practice those skills. He said no, he was satisfied that a solution existed (which is what is important to a mathematician, after all ;-)). I pointed out that his back-up solution seemed to be that I do it. He just smiled.
Some time later, as we both worked at our laptops across from each other at a table in his room (me working on the blog, him working at the letter he is composing for Ward’s memorial), Gary brought up the comment I’d made last night, that it was better that he was amused by it taking him so long to put his shirt on than to be frustrated by it. He said that it had never occurred to him to be frustrated by it, that “this is the way it is – it takes me fifteen minutes of wobbling around to get my shirt on.” I told him that if I were in his situation my reaction would probably be to be frustrated a lot of the time, to get mad at myself because I couldn’t accomplish “the goal” quickly. I’d had the same thought today when watching him so patiently trying to touch my hand during the balance exercises – if our positions had been reversed, I’d probably have been screaming in frustration. I told him it was a good thing he didn’t have my personality.
He let me read his letter for Ward’s memorial, and it made me cry and laugh, it being about what Ward had meant to him and also relating an amusing anecdote about a camping trip they’d taken.
Though as of yesterday Gary is unrestricted in the time he can sit in his wheelchair, he said he now needed a nap, conveniently deciding this was the case at the time he should have been checking to see if his laundry could be put in the dryer ;-). So, we got him transferred into the bed and positioned. He fell asleep immediately. I put his laundry in the dryer and left until evening. When I returned, he was sitting in his wheelchair and said he’d managed to also get out of taking his laundry out of the dryer – someone else had done that for him (no doubt wanting to use the dryer), and had even neatly folded his laundry for him, leaving it on top of the dryer. I felt the teeniest tiniest smidgeon of guilt: I had taken someone else’s laundry out of the dryer to make room for Gary’s, and though I hadn’t crumpled it into a ball, I had done a hasty folding job. Hey, it’s bad enough to do Gary’s laundry – I ain’t doing some stranger’s.
Joe called with an update. All the final major stuff was done: wood floors put in, tiles laid, most of the fixtures put in. Fantastic!
After Joe’s call, I told Gary it was time for him to get into bed – we still had his stretching to do and his wound care. So we did that, and when I saw his wound, I regretted that he’d had the nurse change his dressing yesterday morning – again, tape had been put on a part that should have been protected with gauze, IMHO, and the area looked aggravated. I’m going to have to remember that if there are times when it seems necessary that the nurse or tech change the dressing, that at least I should check to see how they’ve bandaged it.
After getting him positioned, I climbed in with him for about ten minutes. When I made to get out, he said wistfully but not really serious, “Why don’t you stay the night?”
I told him because I didn’t want the nurses to accidently do his midnight and six a.m. ICs and his five-thirty a.m. bowel program on me.
***
Well, wish me luck with the hotel situation. The long-term residents who had been living next to me moved out. They had turned out to be pretty good neighbors (I suppose they were about the best one could hope for in a hotel situation), and I’m a little anxious about who is going to be in there now. No one seems to have checked in so far, but I’m sure that luck won’t hold ;-) I had thought of offering to pay the former neighbors to live there another two weeks until I leave this place to live with Gary in the Day Program apartment . . . ;-)
Ah, Saturday. Day of only one therapy session. This Saturday, Gary’s session was run by the woman who’d said the next time she saw him she wanted to see that he could lift his head off the mat and that his rolls had improved. He was ready for her. But before he got to show this off, she set him other tasks. First came one of his favorite exercises ;-) : fifty depression lifts using the pushup blocks. At least they were the kind where his legs dangled off the edge of the mat. The therapist had to oversee other people at the same time as Gary (so I guess that’s the standard Saturday situation), so she waited until I returned from his room with his grabber (for a later task) before starting him on the lifts. She went off, and I knelt behind Gary while he did the lifts to make sure he didn’t fall backwards onto the mat and hurt his head.
After that, she gave him balancing exercises, me aiding him while she went to the mat next to us to help another person. For these exercises, I stood in front of Gary and he reached out and touched my hand with one of his hands, his other hand either behind him on the mat or on his knee. We first started with my hand directly in front of him, then to one side – eye height, higher, lower – then to the other side in various positions, so he had to cross his hand over his body, which was actually the easiest kind of touches. He started out very wobbly – which set off my vertigo, but I didn’t tell him that; it was an interesting experience (not one I particularly recommend ;-)) watching him wobble around like a weighted chicken’s egg while I myself felt like I was on a rolling ship. After we did it a while, he got smoother at it, able to slowly reach out his hand and touch mine in a controlled manner instead of starting to slowly reach out then batting at my hand hoping he’d hit it before he had to catch himself from falling. He said it was unbelievable how tiring these exercises were, due to how much concentration they demanded; he said he knew they looked simple, but they certainly were not. The PT came over and told him that the purpose of the exercises was for him to learn what he needed to do to keep his balance, to learn to reach as far as he could, but also to learn just how far he could reach, and where, before he would topple – everyone has such a maximum reach, but at the same time it wouldn’t be good for him to limit himself unnecessarily.
After that, his task was to get his shoes off. But the new grabber was too heavy and big for him to manipulate it to get the velcro undone, and even after I’d undone the velcro for him, he couldn’t push the grabber into his shoe and get it off. So, he will have to work on this problem, perhaps by using a lighter grabber while he's in the sitting position or by taking his shoes off when he is already lying in bed and not beforehand (unfortunately, taking his shoes off after he gets into bed presents the problem of getting his feet onto the bed with his shoes on – the friction of the shoes against the surface of the bed mattress makes it hard to get his feet up by himself). The PT had the excellent suggestion that he should think about what he wants his routine at home to be like, and then to try to go through the steps of the routine here and see if he runs into any problems that could be worked on these next weeks.
She next wanted us to run through his stretching exercises. That first involved him lying on the mat on his back, properly padded off with pillows. She asked to see him raise his head so she could put a pillow under it. He did so. She cheered because he hadn’t been able to lift his head off the mat two weeks ago. She then taught him the routine she goes through with her four-year-old daughter when some goal is achieved: first they did a high five, then touched their fists together in a “rock” (as in the game “rock, paper, scissors”), then they raised their hands in inward-facing fists and pumped downward at the elbows, yelling, “Yes!” She told him she hated to tell him but her four-year-old looked much cuter when she did it.
She then had us do his stretches. She tsked at his lack of flexibility when we got to the last exercise, the hamstring stretch where I kneel next to him and raise his leg while he is on his back (he pulls on the chain loop wrapped around his foot in order to support some of his weight). She showed me another way to get more stretch on that exercise by kneeling next to him, keeping my arms straight – one at his heel, the other below his knee – and leaning forward. She did it on him first. Gary’s eyes got round, and he asked if she should really be stretching him that far, saying that if he could feel, he was sure that would hurt. She assured him she wasn’t over-stretching him, but I’m not sure he was convinced. She said he needed to work up to a 110 degree angle on the stretch, and he couldn’t even do a 90 yet. Gary said we’d work up to it, but he didn’t want to do that all in one day!
After that she wanted to see his rolls from his back to his side, and they went through another “Yes!” routine when he showed off how he could do them now. He told her that her tips had been in large part responsible for his improvement, but she refused to take the credit. She gave us both hugs when she found out that he wouldn’t be an inpatient in two weeks, so that this was likely the last time she’d see him. She told him it was on account of people like him that she stayed at this job. She had been the person who had done his PT eval when he’d first come in on May 17th, those tests to see what and where he could and couldn’t feel. She recalled that he’d been barely able to sit at the time, and now he was well on the road to independence.
After that came the lunchtime routine. Joe called and gave us an update on the house. He mentioned that he’d had time (or rather, made time) to modify the kitchen sink access so that there would be no obstruction to Gary rolling under it. Joe had lined the sides and the back edge under the sink with wood, so everything was “neatified.” He was hoping the tile guy would come some time today and tile the floor under the sink to match the other tiles in the kitchen. Other updates were that the shades for the various rooms should be arriving next Thursday (on Jo Heath’s watch ;-)), that Sylvia would feed the cats, and that he’d had to do a little conniving to get the dumpster people to do as they’d said they’d do and remove the dumpster today. Joe had also put a second coat of paint on both bathrooms and installed some of the fixtures.
He also mentioned that our poor kitties have been freaked out these past few days because of all the various workers – no surprise to us. He said he’s spent time trying to calm them down at night, especially Blackjack. He observed that they would probably be very unhappy kitties after he left because they wouldn’t be getting the day in and day out attention he’d been able to give them in our absence. :-(
I turned the phone over to Gary, as Joe might not be able to stop into Shepherd tomorrow to say goodbye. Gary told Joe that what he’d done had been truly amazing and that we’d be forever grateful. Tears came to Gary as he said that, but I doubt Joe noticed.
A little later in the afternoon, Gary decided he needed to do laundry. He asked me if I’d help by looking into the washer to see if there were any clothes in it and later by putting the clothes into the dryer, since it would take me two seconds to do something that it would take him ten minutes to do. I asked him if he was sure he didn’t want to practice those skills. He said no, he was satisfied that a solution existed (which is what is important to a mathematician, after all ;-)). I pointed out that his back-up solution seemed to be that I do it. He just smiled.
Some time later, as we both worked at our laptops across from each other at a table in his room (me working on the blog, him working at the letter he is composing for Ward’s memorial), Gary brought up the comment I’d made last night, that it was better that he was amused by it taking him so long to put his shirt on than to be frustrated by it. He said that it had never occurred to him to be frustrated by it, that “this is the way it is – it takes me fifteen minutes of wobbling around to get my shirt on.” I told him that if I were in his situation my reaction would probably be to be frustrated a lot of the time, to get mad at myself because I couldn’t accomplish “the goal” quickly. I’d had the same thought today when watching him so patiently trying to touch my hand during the balance exercises – if our positions had been reversed, I’d probably have been screaming in frustration. I told him it was a good thing he didn’t have my personality.
He let me read his letter for Ward’s memorial, and it made me cry and laugh, it being about what Ward had meant to him and also relating an amusing anecdote about a camping trip they’d taken.
Though as of yesterday Gary is unrestricted in the time he can sit in his wheelchair, he said he now needed a nap, conveniently deciding this was the case at the time he should have been checking to see if his laundry could be put in the dryer ;-). So, we got him transferred into the bed and positioned. He fell asleep immediately. I put his laundry in the dryer and left until evening. When I returned, he was sitting in his wheelchair and said he’d managed to also get out of taking his laundry out of the dryer – someone else had done that for him (no doubt wanting to use the dryer), and had even neatly folded his laundry for him, leaving it on top of the dryer. I felt the teeniest tiniest smidgeon of guilt: I had taken someone else’s laundry out of the dryer to make room for Gary’s, and though I hadn’t crumpled it into a ball, I had done a hasty folding job. Hey, it’s bad enough to do Gary’s laundry – I ain’t doing some stranger’s.
Joe called with an update. All the final major stuff was done: wood floors put in, tiles laid, most of the fixtures put in. Fantastic!
After Joe’s call, I told Gary it was time for him to get into bed – we still had his stretching to do and his wound care. So we did that, and when I saw his wound, I regretted that he’d had the nurse change his dressing yesterday morning – again, tape had been put on a part that should have been protected with gauze, IMHO, and the area looked aggravated. I’m going to have to remember that if there are times when it seems necessary that the nurse or tech change the dressing, that at least I should check to see how they’ve bandaged it.
After getting him positioned, I climbed in with him for about ten minutes. When I made to get out, he said wistfully but not really serious, “Why don’t you stay the night?”
I told him because I didn’t want the nurses to accidently do his midnight and six a.m. ICs and his five-thirty a.m. bowel program on me.
***
Well, wish me luck with the hotel situation. The long-term residents who had been living next to me moved out. They had turned out to be pretty good neighbors (I suppose they were about the best one could hope for in a hotel situation), and I’m a little anxious about who is going to be in there now. No one seems to have checked in so far, but I’m sure that luck won’t hold ;-) I had thought of offering to pay the former neighbors to live there another two weeks until I leave this place to live with Gary in the Day Program apartment . . . ;-)
posted by Peg Daniels at 5:41 AM
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