12/20

Goodbye hospitalization, hello rehab!  We are all so glad to be out of the hospital and on to the next phase of Dad's recovery process.

But before I talk about that, I've had some people asking for an address to mail cards to my Dad.  I really think he would enjoy getting them, the cards he's already received are lined up on his window sill and certainly bring some life and warmth to his room.  Especially during this holiday time.  So if you'd like to mail him a card:

John Urich
Room 289 W
Helen M Simpson Rehabilitation Hospital
4300 Londonderry Road
Harrisburg, PA  17109

As you know, the rehab hospital is part of Community General Osteopathic Hospital, but they said it's not necessary to include that in the address.

Ok, now that's out of the way,what a big day today was!  I went to HMC early this morning to pick him up and had conversations with his neurologist, internal medicine doctor, and infectious disease doctor.  Everyone said the same thing, that he's having a positive recovery but that it will just continue to take time.  His Keppra (antiseizure medicine) dose was decreased and I found out that he will stay on it for 6 months.  He has had no seizure activity at all since his initial diagnosis, but due to the fact that the area of his brain that's injured is a hot-spot for seizures and that he still has a good bit of brain swelling/irritation he needs to take the medicine as a precaution.  He will receive the Acyclovir (antiviral medicine) in his PICC line until at least December 26th.  He will follow up with the HMC neurologist and infectious disease doctors in mid-January.  No further MRI or LP (lumbar puncture) is needed at this time as long as he continues to improve clinically.

He's still so tired and wants to spend the majority of the day in bed with his eyes closed, so it was a big day for him getting transferred.  After talking to a million different people at HMC, I loaded him in the car to drive to Osteo.  I was so excited to be blowing that clambake, I think I drove away a little... ahem, vigorously.  He perked up to tell me to take it easy and quit driving crazy.  I told him if I had known that's all it took to wake him up, I would have started doing donuts in the parking lot much earlier.

We got him settled in his new room, he has the bed by the window.  He had a roommate this morning but they were discharged, so I'm not sure when/if he may be getting another roommate.  His new doctor, Dr. Morganstein, came to see him right away.  I really like Dr. Morganstein, he's caring, thorough, really smart, and just seems like a great doctor.  He also had an assessment by the Osteo neurologist, who will be seeing him while he's at the rehab facility.  Then he went down to the gym for evaluations by the PT and OT therapists.  He did really well, once again I'm happy to post that he improves every single day.  He still used the walker, but he walked even farther today than yesterday.  He was steadier on his feet and faster too.  They had him do exercises to demonstrate his fine motor skills and overall strength.  Although I can tell he's definitely still weak, I thought he did really well considering he's been in a hospital for the past 15 days, the vast majority of that time laying in bed.  They also asked him a lot of questions to assess his memory and cognition.  He answered them all correctly (though it often took some time for the answer to come to him) except he couldn't recall his phone number or email address.  But I had to laugh because the physical therapist asked him what his number one goal was that he wanted to work on while at the rehab hospital, and his answer was "to escape".

After getting back to his room and eating dinner, he had a particularly alert period.  As I mentioned before, he's typically VERY tired.  Healing the brain is so intensive that it's normal for him to be fatigued and want to sleep a lot.  So it's really nice when he perks up, opens his eyes, and has a nice period of alertness.  Tonight was the closest I've seen him to his old self.  His affect was brighter, he was quicker to interact, and for the first time he actually initiated a little dialogue.  Normally you have to ask him a direct question to get him to say much.  He looked at me out of the blue and said "Just so you know, my phone number is ____ and my email address is jurich347@gmail.com" (I had to put a blank for the phone number because I can't even remember it, ha!).  This is SO my dad.  I have no doubt that when he was asked those two questions in PT and couldn't remember the answers right away, it bothered him.  And it's no surprise that his brain went to work on figuring it out and wouldn't rest until it did.

We were also talking about how my dad's boss Rick was going to come visit this week and my grandmother said "Oh, is he the one from Chicago?" and he immediately corrected her and said "Philadelphia".  We were talking about his co-worker Greg and how he sent two giant bags of this DELICIOUS coffee that's unique to Louisiana, I couldn't remember the name of the brand and Dad was quick to tell me what it was.  And he got a big chuckle out of an email from Greg that I read aloud, over all their inside jokes.  Simple things like this would have taken longer for him to react to just a few days ago, so it's encouraging to see positive progress.  Then after about half an hour of that wakeful period, he zonked back out to sleep for pretty much the rest of the night.

Tomorrow starts his first official day at rehab.  He will have at least three hours of therapy a day, broken up into smaller chunks of time.  He will meet with the speech therapist at 9am for an evaluation of his speech and swallowing.  Then at 10am he will have his first full one-hour PT session.  He'll have an hour-long OT session in the afternoon.  I'm looking forward to seeing how this new level of activity will help improve his recovery.