4/6/15 Chuck’s report
Time for an update on Lorraine’s recovery from the stroke she suffered on March 22, 2015.
We have finally gotten at least one visit from all three therapy disciplines, physical, occupational and speech. I’m still a bit confused of where physical stops and occupational begins but basically occupational is dealing with ordinary items in life. But regardless, she has “homework” from all three that we need to do, everyone says Lorraine is showing good sings of improvement, including me.
The occupational gal has Lorraine reading letters of the alphabet from a page out loud, find certain letters in a string of letters, find words hidden in a string of letters and such. The speech gal has her name objects, write down the word for the object then write a sentence using that word. She then will describes something and Lorraine has to try to name whatever she is describing. Next she has Lorraine name as many things in a category, such as how many vegetables can you think off in 5 minutes. The last test is to hold a conversation with her, this time it was to tell her what we did this weekend. Lorraine told her she felt like she was doing a physical test not just mental.
We also have Lorraine name things while we are walking, what the object is used for and so on. Mostly this is to get her to verbalize whatever she is “seeing” in her brain. Even though she gets frustrated and tires easily, we are still doing homework often although we didn’t do a lot yesterday.
The speech therapist said Lorraine is able to understand what she sees, reads or hears and process all that info fine; her problem comes from “confrontationally input”. This really shows up when she is confronted with a question from someone, she has problems with the answer. This is why she was having issues showing us where her elbow was or coming up with proper names for items. Both the OT and speech therapist are working on basically the same things in this problem area. The OT is working more on the her vision loss than either of the other two therapists.
We went to an eye doctor this past week, he checked our Lorraine’s eyes and told us there is no physical problem with her eyes and was pleased to see how much vision she has recovered since her hospital stay. He is fairly certain that she will continue to improve in this area too, yea. We have a follow-up appointment with him next week to see what improvements he sees in the past two weeks.
This past week we’ve picked Katie up from school, most days she had some homework which we tried to get finished before she started playing. She is really into My Little Pony, Little Pet Shop (LPS) and Shopkins. She likes to keep up with some gal who posts movies of her LPS online, I guess this gal has over 1,000,000 followers. Katie is starting to paint some of her LPS figures and makes movies of them using a phone. Boy, kids are sure not afraid of technology and even this 9 year old knows much more than I do.
Susy returned back to work after being off for almost a month. Her boss had some guy following her projects while she was off but seems the guy didn’t spend much time on Susy’s project so she had to hit the ground running to get caught up and get back on schedule to meet her deadlines. She said the first day she was back to work she had a headache in the first hour. But last time I asked her, she said she had her projects back on track and her boss had noticed her replacement guy hadn’t done much work while she was off. Susy has been stopping by our place after work to visit and have dinner with us then she and Katie head home for the evening.
A couple times this past week I’ve taken Lorraine out to a store, she does just fine, remembers what she needs and where to find it in the store. For example, if we need a can of soup, she remembers and knows which isle to find it. That’s a good thing because I really have signs of old timers or CRS (can’t remember stuff).
The day before Lorraine had her stroke we were out four wheeling in Pismo Beach area, had a great time. Only issue we had was our camera got dropped and now the lenses won’t open and when that happens the camera won’t turn on either. I checked at a couple of places for a replacement but we want one that is a point and shoot that has a “view through the lenses” feature. I guess nobody makes them with this feature anymore, instead the LCD screens now move and rotate so you can see them better in direct light. But Lorraine really likes the view finder so it was to the computer for Amazon and EBay.
I’m not real literate on these sites but Susy is an expert compared so once I found what I was looking for, she was able to finish the order for us. We ended up with a “buy now” on EBay, Susy knew how to make an offer for less than the buy now price and they accepted our offer. We paid $10 for shipping and two days later the package shows up at Susy’s house. We bought the same model number of the old one and this one appears to work fine. I actually looked through the user’s manual and was reminded of a lot of features that we never have used, probably never will either. But we now have a camera again, although with the cameras on both of our phones we thought about not getting a real camera but it’s nice to have, just old fashioned I guess.
We have an ink jet printer in our rig, we don’t use it too often and it’s been giving me problems lately and this week the it ran out of ink. Saturday we headed to Fry’s Electronic store to get new ink and found the ink cartridges were more expensive than a new printer. They actually have two printers on sale for less than $30 and they included the ink.
But Susy recommended we think about getting a laser printer instead of an ink jet, cheaper per copy and less trouble. They had a couple on sale but they didn’t include a copier so we were just about to walk out when a salesman guy came by. I told him what we were looking for and he found one that was less than half price and “just happened” to be on sale today too. So we ended up getting a new laser printer, copier, scanner and whatever other features it has to replace the ink jet. We also bought a new toner cartridge for it as the one that comes with the new machine doesn’t print but about 50 pages before it runs dry. So now we have both a new camera and a new printer or should I say, a replacement for both.
After our trip to Fry’s, Lorraine and Susy dropped me off at our rig while they went back out shopping. I was able to put the printer together and get it to work. It’s a wireless type, first time I’ve dealt with one of them but it’s working so must have done something right. Of course, they include a CD disk with easy to follow instructions, mostly just click “yes” when prompted.
Yesterday was Easter Sunday. The lodge was having a nice brunch so we signed up to all of us to go. It was a nice brunch but I was surprised they didn’t have an omelet station, in fact, they didn’t even have eggs, only quiche (and real men don’t eat quiche). But the rest of the meal was fine, just thought they would have had eggs.
After brunch, the lodge also put on a Easter egg hunt for the kids. Must have been 25 kids there, they had an area set aside for the little kids and a large grassy yard for the older ones. Katie was with the older kids but she didn’t have any problems, she managed to get her “share”, even tried to share some of hers with a handicapped kid who didn’t participate.
Later we headed over to Susy’s house while Mark took Katie to Great America for more Easter activities and to ride a couple rides. Lorraine and Susy made a good Easter dinner, ham, potatoes, jello, Easter eggs with Red Velvet cake and/or apple pie for dessert. That was almost too much after our brunch but I managed, even had some apple pie too.
The speech therapist came by this morning just as I was starting to write this and worked with Lorraine for about 45 minutes. While she was here, the physical therapist called and made an appointment for later this afternoon. Then her doctor’s office called to let us know the neurologist doctor had an opening even later this afternoon and wanted to see Lorraine. This will be our first visit to this neurologist so don’t know what to expect but we will bring all the records from the hospital for him to check out. The above should give you some idea of what our days will be like, therapist visits every day and doctor visits plus phone calls from the same. But we are getting the medical attention she needs so I am not complaining for sure.
This Elks lodge only allows for 14 consecutive days camping in their park but I wrote a letter to them and asked for an extension due to the therapy Lorraine is getting and just heard we can stay until her therapy is completed in early May, yea. That means we will be here and won’t have to leave for three days every two weeks.
This park has water and power hookups at each site and it also has a dump station available, it’s close enough that I can use a long, regular water hose to dump our grey water tank every other day and can leave it hooked up when doing laundry too. But we don’t have enough sewer hose to reach the dump site to empty our black water tank. This means putting stuff away, disconnecting the water and power, bring in the slides, start the rig and raise the stabilizer jacks. We then have to drive over to the dump area and empty our tanks before returning to our site and reversing all the above steps, a hassle but something we have to do once a week or so. But our neighbor happens to have enough sewer hose to reach the dump and I asked him if I could attach our hose to his and empty our tank whenever he is empting his. So now we don’t have to move the rig to empty either the grey or black tanks, yea.
The weather has been ok the past week, highs getting into the 70s, once it even got to the upper 80s, very unusually for this time of the year around here. But we did get a system that cooled us off and even got a little bit of rain yesterday. They are predicting another system coming in tonight/tomorrow that should give us some measureable amounts of rain them back to mostly sunny days for the rest of the week.
Again, I don’t have any pictures to add this week although Susy did show me how and she downloaded all the pictures from Lorraine’s cell phone. She has over 1000 pictures so I really need to go through them and when I do I may make another post just to add some of those pictures.
But for now, guess that’s all. I’ll get this posted before the physical therapist comes by, supposed to be in a half hour.
Thanks Chuck
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