1/25

This was a good week.

The neck pain is still very much present, but has been downgraded to mostly a dull aching throb instead of a constant sharp stabbing pain.  He's often able to get in a position where he has very little pain for awhile.  He's doing awesome in speech therapy, the therapist is giving him more complex logic puzzles.  They're hard!  I swear it takes me just as long to work them out.  He also has a yellow homework folder with a variety of different cognitive exercises to do at home each night.  When we first came home from rehab, I had to pester, torment, and bribe him to do any of this stuff at home.  Now he does it totally of his own accord, and even does the daily crossword on top of that.  He has done something physical every day, if he didn't have PT then he went to the gym.  Tomorrow I'm taking him to Gold's again.  This time I'm going to motivate myself to actually work out instead of lazily trailing him around with a cup of coffee.  February 2nd is his last scheduled PT appointment.  Initially we thought he might need to extend it another couple of weeks, but now I'm doubtful we'll need to.  I think after February 2nd he'll just transition to doing everything at Gold's.  He still has to work hard on the balance exercises in PT, but even he admitted that he would have had a hard time with them even before his illness.

He's gone to pick up Zoey from preschool with me twice this week too, which was great.  Zoey gets all excited when she sees him through the window.  

He's very anxious to start driving his truck again.  We're going to ease into it, at the end of next week I'm going to take him to a big parking lot and let him drive around.  We'll do that for about a week.  When that goes well, I'll start letting him drive on back roads to go places, always with me in the passenger seat.  We'll progress to more and more driving around the area until he's completely ready to have his truck back.  I think he'll be back to driving on his own by the end of February.  Honestly, he probably would do just fine earlier but I'd like to just be on the cautious side and take it slow.  

Sometimes I can momentarily forget how serious and life-threatening his illness was.  He's recovering so much faster and so much better than anyone thought, it's easy to lose sight of.  Especially when he's excelling so well physically and doing so great with his cognitive exercises.  But the biggest reason he's gotten so far so fast is through his dogged determination and constant struggle to improve.  It's cliche, but my dad is a serious fighter.  This recovery hasn't come easy, he's had to earn it.

He continues to battle difficulties with short-term memory, like recalling what he had for breakfast or keeping track of his exact schedule for the week.  He makes it a point to ask enough times until it's cemented though.  Sometimes he might mix up details or dates.  He still can get a bit sensory-overwhelmed in crowded or noisy places or just when his mind has been working on overdrive, but that's getting less.  Things often come up that he can't quite think of or find the answer to but he fixates on them determinedly until he figures it out.  Like remembering which way he used to drive home from the gym or what one of the bridges is called in Harrisburg.  So many things flit in and out of our minds so easily.  He has to work really hard to think of some things that we just take for granted.  But it's that hard work and determination that are pushing him to improve leaps and bounds ahead of when we thought he would.