Thursday, April 23, 2009

Christy is taking her pills well by mouth!!!  This was one of the challenges to overcome to get closer to getting the PEG out.  Christy was having some bad experiences with bad tastes in her mouth with the pills as well.  

They are concerned that Christy may be loosing a little too much weight, though.  Chrsity is being weighed weekly but is loosing weight.  She was up around her normal weight pre-accident, but is now having trouble keeping it on.  Christy eats pretty good for the most part, but has days where she doesn't eat as well.  Christy is also burning up a lot of calories during therapies.  She is walking and doing aquatic therapies all day long.  

They are also checking some blood work to make sure her electrolytes and other labs are optimal.  

Christy is doing an exercise with speech that is helping her pronunciation.  She slaps her knee with each syllable of the word to slow her down and enunciate more.  It's working, so 

that's great. Her speech is getting better and we're hoping that when she comes home she'll have all of her medications just right for optimal speech and coordination of muscle movements.  Dr. Ripley is working on it.  

There was a mini-meeting for an update today with Doctor Ripley & gang.  They gave an idea of where Christy is now and how things are progressing.  Dr. Ripley talked about her medications again. He's always thinking of the best way to tweak her meds to get her in an ideal position to fight the coordination control problems she's having. 

Christy had an eye Doctor visit today.  Christy was trying on some frames for her glasses.  Christy is going to be wearing glasses now.  Donald had to work with the eye glass worker girls to pick a cute pair out for Chris.  Christy can't see perfectly, so it is kinda hard for her to choose frames independently.  Christy's vision seems to be improving daily.  The doctor asks Chris to follow his finger as one of the vision tests.  Originally, she would follow his finger but loose track of it in the middle, then catch up again.  Today, Christy was tracking his finger perfectly!!!  

Christy is impressing us with progress constantly!  Christy couldn't hardly stretch out her leg when she left Queens to go to Craig.  She was contracted.  Now, if Christy had her knee(s) bent up towards her body and asked her to straiten her leg(s)... she could put it down right away and strait out!!  That's so awesome.  All Christy's hard work is really paying off.

Christy, Donald, Alan, Luis, Luis' roommate & Joe and Gloria all went to dinner tonight

 at Olive Garden.  Don's favorite.  It's so fun to go places we don't have here in Hawaii while on the mainland! It's so awesome that Christy can go

 out to dinner off campus with the gang!!  

Christy is progressing every day and so much of her strength comes from the love and prayers sent to her on a daily basis.  So, Thank you for loving and following every day!