Dad is now in the Rehabilitation Center on the 4th floor of the hospital. He seemed anxious and after a full day today, was quite out of sorts when I got there. A busy day, a new schedule and lots and lots of work for him. The speech therapist worked on swallowing. Another day or two and his trach site will be healed over so he can do a barium swallow test. He got to have some water, pudding and other treats so that she could see how he's doing. Yummy since the only thing he's had in his mouth has been a bit of mouthwash on a little sponge and some tart lemon swabs to stimulate salivating.
Physical therapy wore him out. He complained about the pain - getting stretched after being bedridden for 6 weeks is going to be hard. He also went on about some off the wall stuff, but after he started to calm down, that went away. Our hope is that he can recover enough to come home. The hard thing is trying to encourage him without threatening him or making him feel that it's his fault if he doesn't improve. It's possible that he won't be able to accomplish certain things. And then you have to make it upbeat that working hard and being in pain is what he has to do in order to make progress. And then I wonder if therapy just keeps getting harder because once he gets to one point, there will always be more to work on. Plus we have no idea of how it feels for him and he knows it and says that and I wish we could take some of that from him. He has to do all this extremely hard work himself.
So that was Day 1. Keep tuned in!
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