Thursday, April 2, 2009

Christy looked around today and thought that her vision was crazy good!!!  After a good night's sleep her brain was making the right connections! ya!  As the day goes on, Christy gets progressively tired and her vision starts to worsen.  What a blessing, though, to have these sneak peaks of more big progress to come!  It's right there!

Here is Chris in her early session with

 physical therapy today.  The therapist love laying Christy flat because it stretches out all of her leg muscles, especially her hip.  Christy is getting closer and closer to laying flat and getting all stretched out.  It's awesome!

Christy is in the standing frame in this picture, posing like a rock star!  She made it all the way up, body strait with her hips fully extended and her hips over her knees!  FIRST TIME up all the way like this-- that's major!  Progress every day!!  Awesome job Christy!

Alan is playing connect four with Christy today during Occupational therapy!  Alan and Luis made it over to see Christy during Alan's lunch hour!  Connect four helps Christy perfect her motor coordination and focusing on things with her eyes!  Plus it's fun!  

Christy had an appointment with the spasticity clinic today! In today's visit, they were deciding what they could do for Christy to help with the muscle spasms.  They had a tough time weighing the pros and cons of the treatment.  Christy is at a point where she's made so much progress with stretching and strengthening, that they question if their treatment will be totally beneficial.  Christy spent a while waiting for her spasticity appointment, and in the mean time, she worked her way through her spasms with just her inner strength.  The treatment that the spasticity clinic can offer involves injecting a drug into the nerve area that weakens the nerve.  This helps because the muscle and nerves can stretch out with less pain.   The cons of this procedure include having the nerve/muscle weak for about three months! That's long.  Furthermore, the needle they use to inject the muscle is big.  It's also hard to get the needle in the nerve in the groin and they may have to try multiple times- which is obviously uncomfortable.   After looking at all the facts, they decided with Donald and Christy that it may not be the best thing to do the injection.  Christy has made so much progress in the little less than a month that she's been at Craig.  She has two more months at Craig which hold tons of potential for great progress, and we should give her a chance to do it all naturally.  Imagine where Chrsity could be.  Christy has the strength and the endurance to do it all!!  

I also wanted to mention the wonderful progress Christy's made with Malea from speech. Remember we talked about the bag of things that Malea has.  Everyday things like a comb, a flower, a toothbrush, come out of the bag and Christy has to identify them.  The last time Christy identified the flower and had a harder time identifying the other objects by herself.  This time, she pulled out the items one by one and Christy nailed them all!!! Yes!  Christy is doing so so so well!  Christy is speaking clearer again.  She's much easier to understand and she's eating more and more!  The one and only catheter left in her is the PEG.  The staff is doing a calorie count on her to assess how well she's eating.  This means, they look at what she has eaten, and they add up the calories for the day to see if she's eating enough calories to keep her body healing.  

We're so excited about all of the progress that's been going on at Craig (the wonderfulest hospital)!  Christy's commitment to work hard is shining through in all of her success stories! Love it!