12/21

Today was the first full day of rehab.  It was long, therapeutic, illuminating, and exhausting for my dad.  By the end of the day, he was SPENT.

His days at rehab will have a predictable schedule, he has a set routine for all of his therapies.  I think Dad will really respond well to this, if you know him at all then you know he thrives on predictable daily routines.  So the days will look like this:

7:30 - Breakfast
9:00 - Speech Therapy
10:00 - Physical Therapy
11:30 - Lunch
1:00 - Occupational Therpay
4:30 - Dinner

For breakfast and lunch he eats in one of the activity rooms with a group of other patients and the speech therapists.  He does well eating on his own, but he'll eat in there mostly just to get supervision to make sure he eats enough.  He's so fatigued that he often doesn't have a lot of energy to eat, so that's definitely an area that we've been encouraging.

I've learned a lot already about the speech therapy hour.  Honestly before today I really had no idea what speech therapy even was, I thought it was just literally about speech and talking.  But it's SO much more.  It's heavily about cognition, memory/recollection, language usage, attention to detail, executive/higher level thinking.  Today was his official evaluation and he did quite well, I didn't know he was already capable of all this stuff until today when I watched his evaluation.  They asked him all the basic orientation questions, which he got correct.  They showed him flashcards of objects, he answered those all correctly.  Then they conducted an official cognition test.  He had to read a paragraph and answer questions about it, listen to a story and answer questions, do two mazes, then do spatial relations exercises.  For one, there were circles and triangles of varying sizes on a paper, he had to draw a line from the smallest circle to the smallest triangle, then to the next largest circle and the next largest triangle, and so on.  I personally found it challenging but he did just fine.  His biggest problem was speed.  Each section was timed and he usually took longer than the allotted time to think through the answers.  He usually got everything correct, it just took him a little while to reach the answer.  This doesn't bother me though, he's still so tired and trying to heal.  The fact that he got the answers RIGHT is what I think is awesome.  And get this, one of his exercises was to to name as many words beginning with the letter "M" as he could within 60 seconds.  If it were me doing the test, I would have named things like money, man, mail, mom.  Easy stuff.  What are some of the words my dad came up with?  Mammogram, monotone, manuscript, maelstrom.  Seriously - MAELSTROM.  Even with a swollen infected brain, he named maelstrom as an "m" word. So I'd say his thinking cap is doing pretty darn good, all things considered.

At the end of that hour though he was VERY tired, so they didn't push him all that much in PT.  He walked around the gym with his walker a couple of times and did some leg exercises.  I missed the OT session, but they said it went ok.  I came back at dinner time, we smuggled him in some junky fast food and brought Zoey and Finn to see him.  Once again, he lit up at seeing his grandkids.  He became more alert, smiled and watched them play, and really enjoyed Zoey sitting on his lap to eat.

It wasn't long before he was tired again though, so the kids went home with Marty and I made it my mission to get Dad into the shower.  Today marked 17 days since he'd had a proper shower, those bed sponge baths just don't do the trick.  I demanded that he let the aide help him wash the funk off, for ALL of our sakes.  Well this was no easy feat.  My dad is ridiculously stubborn when he has his mind set on (or against) something and he was NOT in the mood to get up and take a shower.  After much encouragement, begging, and finally bribery he agreed and the aide helped him get washed up.  Although he wouldn't admit it at the time, he had to feel much better getting cleaned up.  Now hopefully later this week he'll let me help him trim/shave his beard and he'll look good as new.

Overall, I think one of his biggest barriers right now is the fatigue.  He's constantly so tired and almost always has his eyes shut.  The fatigue prevents him from thinking quickly, prevents him from being in the mood to eat much, prevents him from doing much physical, prevents him from being attentive.  I wish I knew how long he would be so tired, but I'm guessing it's like everything else with this healing process - it just takes an indeterminate amount of time.  And patience.  Lots and lots of that.