2/04

The Good:

Dad officially graduated from PT!  His physical therapist tested him on a variety of different physical exercises and he passed with flying colors.  His balance, endurance, coordination, and strength have all markedly improved.  So now he'll continue his physical exercises independently at Gold's Gym.  He still has a ways to go before he's able to do the same type of workouts he did before becoming ill, but I think whenever his neck pain finally resolves that he'll be able to do much more.

His last Speech Therapy session may be this week as well.  Evan (his speech therapist) said that he's actually been having a hard time coming up with enough challenging material lately.  Although we did have a disagreement with Evan about one of the projects he gave my Dad that he gave him lower marks on.  We both had to school Evan on how Italians have parties.  The assignment was to plan a fictional pizza party for 12 people using a menu that Evan provided.  He had to also account for two vegetarians and two children as well, pick enough items from the menu to feed everyone, then calculate the total (with tax and tip) correctly without a calculator.  So my dad picked out a total of 12 pizzas, 12 salads, a bunch of desserts, and drinks.  He added all of the numbers perfectly and aced it in my opinion.  However Evan was critical of the fact that he ordered too much food and marked him down a bit, saying "well you would never order that much food for just 12 people, you could have just ordered enough pizzas for everyone to have 2 slices and that would be sufficient".  My dad and I both promptly told Evan he's crazy.  I said "Listen, we're Italian, that's how we roll".  And proceeded to explain that when you come to a party with Italians, you always have too much food, it's just what we do.  You have to have enough to feed everyone, have enough to snack on later, AND have enough to send home with people for leftovers.

The other good thing in this update is that Dad finally got to drive his truck again.  He did great!  We drove around Middletown, out to TMI and up and down 441 and he had no problems whatsoever.  So from now on I'll have him do the driving whenever I pick him up.  We'll do that for a few weeks and then by the end of the month I anticipate he'll have his truck back.  I know he'll be relieved to have that independence.


The Not-As-Good:

For the past few days my dad's neck pain and stiffness have been much worse than they have been for the past couple weeks.  It's been downright excruciating for him at night and he has hardly been able to sleep at all.  It's been keeping him up and he's so tired from it.  In addition, he had one rough episode of "visual flashes" the other night too.  Basically when the brain is healing from encephalitis, it can sometimes fire random electric signals, which can manifest in a variety of ways, in his case seeing a succession of random images flashing before him.  It's very common during the first year and usually just happens at night.  But it can be extremely disconcerting and a bit scary while you wait for it to pass, especially if you don't know it's normal. Thankfully he's only had this a couple of times over the past two months, some people get it constantly and much worse. I'm glad that's not something he's had to deal with much.

However, the increased pain lately combined with that intense episode has me watchful. His mentation and cognition are fantastic and I feel like he's doing great, but I also feel like we can't be too cautious.  I am overly protective and alert for any tiny remote possibility of a return or increase of his original illness, so we're going to schedule a repeat MRI this week.  He was due to have one anyway at his neurology follow-up in April.  I spoke to his neurologist today and she agreed it was prudent to do it now just to make sure the increased pain isn't a sign of anything else and to check how the healing process is coming along.  In addition, we're going to increase his bedtime dose of Neurontin and try some Tylenol PM to see if it will allow him to sleep better at night. With any luck he'll be able to sleep through some of the pain. It's amazing how many aspects of life that pain can affect. I swear if we could just get rid of this darn neck pain, that would fix just about all of his problems!