September 21, 2006
“So, how’d I do?” Gary asked from his bed when I came back into the master bedroom this morning to check on his progress in getting his pants on. I helped him roll to one side then the other, making sure the back pockets weren’t bunched up (we’ve decided he should just cut them off – they are of no use to him, only can cause problems if they’re bunched up and therefore press against him causing pressure sores, and he isn’t flexible enough to reach back into them to straighten them out).
“Well, I believe we can say you got these on all by yourself!” This was the first time I hadn’t had to hike the pants up in the back. We gave each other a high-five and a kiss. It took him about ten, fifteen minutes, we’d say (since we weren’t expecting it, we didn’t have a timer running ;-)). (A later step will be for him to get them on without use of the electric hospital bed controls and the handrails. He uses the controls to help him sit up so he can get the pants on up to his thighs, and then when he is lying flat again, he uses the handrails to help roll himself from side to side to gradually work the pants on up the rest of the way.)
Coincidently, at rehab, his therapist, the same one he’d had Tuesday, said she’d talked to his regular therapist and they’d decided he should practice getting his pants on. He informed her that he had done that this morning, and since he would be in the hospital bed awhile, it didn’t seem all that useful to practice getting them on while lying on the exercise mat (which would be more like what he’ll have to do when he is in a regular bed). So instead she had him do shoulder flexibility exercises and balance exercises (moving cones on and off a board) and some weights on the cable machine. (When he told me this I said I was still a little worried about him losing strength since they weren’t doing all the exercises he’d been doing before, and he said he would continue to do pushups every morning in bed, like he had started this morning.)
To do the balance exercises, he first transferred onto the mat. The brake on the wheelchair had messed up like it did before (the time we fixed it by taking a hammer to it), so the therapist hung onto the chair and had another therapist help Gary with the transfer. This therapist obviously hadn’t any experience doing transfers (and I assume neither did the one working with Gary as clearly the two of them could have exchanged places), and gave Gary way too much help. I felt a little guilty at this and asked Gary if I should come and help with the transfers, but he said no, that to be independent he needed to learn how to tell people how to help him – he said he should have told the guy that he could do this kind of transfer pretty much by himself but that he sometimes had problems with his balance and all he needed was for the guy to catch him if he went forward or backward, but that he didn’t need the guy to hang onto him and boost him over.
By the way, just to lay it out, it is not good to help someone in a wheelchair unless they ask for help, and not just as an independence issue. If you take hold of the wheelchair and push or something and they’re not expecting it, it could be dangerous, since they have gauged how much force to use in pushing their wheels based on doing it themselves.
The bus that picked him up this morning didn’t come up the drive, the driver saying she thought it too steep for the large bus, so he had a new adventure of going all the way down the driveway – the last part being the problematic part. He wanted to save my back, so he had the bus driver hold onto his chair as he went down the last bit (naturally he was also using his hands on the wheels for his own braking, but the driver was aiding that). Since I’m not an entirely trusting soul ;-), I had a hand on the side of the chair as well.
Around dinnertime Gary thought he needed a little more exercise so asked me to go around the outside of our house with him. Good thing he told me he was going to do this and I therefore accompanied him, because otherwise he likely would have tipped over in going down front patio to the grassy area on the side of our house – the drop-off was a bit more than he expected, the slope of the land tilts down there, he didn’t have his chest strap on, and he fell forward. I had had my hands on the handles on the back of his chair as he started to go off the patio, however, and I gripped them as he went off of it since this was new terrain and I was in better-safe-than-sorry mode, and then I grabbed him around the chest as he fell forward. Since he had his seat belt on, at this point there wasn’t any danger he could’ve have fallen completely out of the chair, but the whole thing scared him because he didn’t hear me say I had my hands on the handles and he thought he was going to tip the whole chair over forward.
He put his chest strap on and tightened his seat belt after that (brings to mind shutting the barn door after the horses have escaped ;-)). The rest of the way around the house was just rough terrain – high grass, a narrow path, the land sloping to the right so he had to keep fighting to go somewhat straight.
We only went around the house once. ;-)
His bedtime transfers from wheelchair to bed haven’t yet become impressive ;-), and after another one tonight where he landed on the edge and had to be yanked back from it, he decided maybe we’d better practice transfers on his non-therapy days. Just doing them twice in a day isn’t giving him enough practice on the technique, and at this point we believe it’s more a matter of getting the technique down than of strength.
Janet Rogers informed me that it is her husband, Jack, who is the real photographer in the family, she having taken it up only recently. He was the one who took the old photos of me, and of Gary and me. She says her main contribution has been in scanning and cataloguing the thousands of slides in their collection, and sometimes cropping and tweaking them in Photoshop. Well, you did an excellent of photoshopping out the toilet bowl plunger from that picture of Tigger, Janet! ;-)
“So, how’d I do?” Gary asked from his bed when I came back into the master bedroom this morning to check on his progress in getting his pants on. I helped him roll to one side then the other, making sure the back pockets weren’t bunched up (we’ve decided he should just cut them off – they are of no use to him, only can cause problems if they’re bunched up and therefore press against him causing pressure sores, and he isn’t flexible enough to reach back into them to straighten them out).
“Well, I believe we can say you got these on all by yourself!” This was the first time I hadn’t had to hike the pants up in the back. We gave each other a high-five and a kiss. It took him about ten, fifteen minutes, we’d say (since we weren’t expecting it, we didn’t have a timer running ;-)). (A later step will be for him to get them on without use of the electric hospital bed controls and the handrails. He uses the controls to help him sit up so he can get the pants on up to his thighs, and then when he is lying flat again, he uses the handrails to help roll himself from side to side to gradually work the pants on up the rest of the way.)
Coincidently, at rehab, his therapist, the same one he’d had Tuesday, said she’d talked to his regular therapist and they’d decided he should practice getting his pants on. He informed her that he had done that this morning, and since he would be in the hospital bed awhile, it didn’t seem all that useful to practice getting them on while lying on the exercise mat (which would be more like what he’ll have to do when he is in a regular bed). So instead she had him do shoulder flexibility exercises and balance exercises (moving cones on and off a board) and some weights on the cable machine. (When he told me this I said I was still a little worried about him losing strength since they weren’t doing all the exercises he’d been doing before, and he said he would continue to do pushups every morning in bed, like he had started this morning.)
To do the balance exercises, he first transferred onto the mat. The brake on the wheelchair had messed up like it did before (the time we fixed it by taking a hammer to it), so the therapist hung onto the chair and had another therapist help Gary with the transfer. This therapist obviously hadn’t any experience doing transfers (and I assume neither did the one working with Gary as clearly the two of them could have exchanged places), and gave Gary way too much help. I felt a little guilty at this and asked Gary if I should come and help with the transfers, but he said no, that to be independent he needed to learn how to tell people how to help him – he said he should have told the guy that he could do this kind of transfer pretty much by himself but that he sometimes had problems with his balance and all he needed was for the guy to catch him if he went forward or backward, but that he didn’t need the guy to hang onto him and boost him over.
By the way, just to lay it out, it is not good to help someone in a wheelchair unless they ask for help, and not just as an independence issue. If you take hold of the wheelchair and push or something and they’re not expecting it, it could be dangerous, since they have gauged how much force to use in pushing their wheels based on doing it themselves.
The bus that picked him up this morning didn’t come up the drive, the driver saying she thought it too steep for the large bus, so he had a new adventure of going all the way down the driveway – the last part being the problematic part. He wanted to save my back, so he had the bus driver hold onto his chair as he went down the last bit (naturally he was also using his hands on the wheels for his own braking, but the driver was aiding that). Since I’m not an entirely trusting soul ;-), I had a hand on the side of the chair as well.
Around dinnertime Gary thought he needed a little more exercise so asked me to go around the outside of our house with him. Good thing he told me he was going to do this and I therefore accompanied him, because otherwise he likely would have tipped over in going down front patio to the grassy area on the side of our house – the drop-off was a bit more than he expected, the slope of the land tilts down there, he didn’t have his chest strap on, and he fell forward. I had had my hands on the handles on the back of his chair as he started to go off the patio, however, and I gripped them as he went off of it since this was new terrain and I was in better-safe-than-sorry mode, and then I grabbed him around the chest as he fell forward. Since he had his seat belt on, at this point there wasn’t any danger he could’ve have fallen completely out of the chair, but the whole thing scared him because he didn’t hear me say I had my hands on the handles and he thought he was going to tip the whole chair over forward.
He put his chest strap on and tightened his seat belt after that (brings to mind shutting the barn door after the horses have escaped ;-)). The rest of the way around the house was just rough terrain – high grass, a narrow path, the land sloping to the right so he had to keep fighting to go somewhat straight.
We only went around the house once. ;-)
His bedtime transfers from wheelchair to bed haven’t yet become impressive ;-), and after another one tonight where he landed on the edge and had to be yanked back from it, he decided maybe we’d better practice transfers on his non-therapy days. Just doing them twice in a day isn’t giving him enough practice on the technique, and at this point we believe it’s more a matter of getting the technique down than of strength.
Janet Rogers informed me that it is her husband, Jack, who is the real photographer in the family, she having taken it up only recently. He was the one who took the old photos of me, and of Gary and me. She says her main contribution has been in scanning and cataloguing the thousands of slides in their collection, and sometimes cropping and tweaking them in Photoshop. Well, you did an excellent of photoshopping out the toilet bowl plunger from that picture of Tigger, Janet! ;-)
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