Senioritis

2 more nights sleeping in this hospital. We are so looking forward to not sleeping in the hospital any longer. I feel myself wanting to rush through the day so it will be over and feeling annoyed about having to eat at the cafeteria again. We just have to get through Friday midday and then we are free, as Alistair would say!

Monday Alistair had his half day of therapies and then he and Seth came home. We ended up staying around the house for quite a while, playing video games, and then headed out to run some errands. We got home with groceries for dinner, put a kibosh on video games and sent the kids upstairs to play. Well lo and behold they found something to do with Legos together and then Gillian helped Alistair look at a Lego book. Truth be told, the video game playing has been very good for Alistair's arm and hand. It is beginning to bend easier and his hand function is starting to come back...I just hate having the video games on all the time! We had a nice BBQ'd dinner and cleaned up. Then Seth and Alistair headed back to the hospital.

Tuesday, Alistair had a fairly productive day. He decided in PT to try working with his lacrosse stick a little bit and did some stretching. Seth said he looked pretty good!  In OT he worked on a lot of fine motor skills with writing/drawing and picking up small stuff. He decided he wanted to go to the classroom for school and once there decided he wanted to join the other students in the hospital on Thursday for the first day of school at Children's. He is going to participate in the Science lesson! He also had a Recreation Therapy outing to Archie Mcphee. His one list item he has not completed yet while in rehab involves fake poop. I never really had a high opinion of Archie Mcphee before (AKA The Crap Store), but somehow my opinion dropped even more! Upon entering the store Alistair asked the clerk where the fake poop was. Quite indignantly the clerk said, "we don't sell fake poop here, we never have!" Oh, sorry, I didn't realize the fake eyeball laying in a pool of blood or the girl squirrel underpants (undies for a squirrel) was classier than fake poop. Whatever, we found something with which to improvise.

Alistair had a long day yesterday with his schedule and therapies. We recently bought him a Fitbit Charge to motivate him to walk and move more and hopefully build up strength and stamina. Yesterday was his best day to date. He walked down to almost the cafeteria and back, down to Starbucks and back by the entrance and walked his entire outing, not to mention to all his therapies. Then after dinner he and I took a walk up to the rooftop garden. He was tired last night and then also today...partly due to his busy day yesterday and partly due to his not sleeping great last night.

Today we had a bit of a quieter day, but it was peppered with a few exciting things! First this morning he had his swallow study with hopes of passing on to regular liquids and not having to thicken anything anymore. It was scheduled for an hour, 10 minutes into it after more or less chugging two cups of liquid with no issues, she was convinced that he passed with flying colors! He can drink whatever he wants! Yee-haw! He came back and told everyone on the floor who would listen! They were so excited for him. Because he can do regular liquids now and because his incision has healed, he was cleared to go to the pool. He is super excited for PT tomorrow as it will be 1 hour in the pool!! We also worked on transferring into the Pilot today. He did great with a foot stool and seemed pretty happy about being in one of our cars. Nana and Papa were nice enough to let us use their car for a while, but I think he enjoyed sitting in HIS seat! Tomorrow or Friday we will work on transferring into the Durango now that we have running boards on it. He is really looking forward to sitting in his seat in the new car! Although if he is anything like Gillian, the novelty of sitting in the third row easily will trump the captains chair real fast!

Heading to the nurses station to spread the good news!

                                      Cheers to regular liquids!                                        

Alistair had another canine visitor today, Allie. We have seen her before. She is a sweet golden and much like all the other dogs who visit Alistair, find his room to be quite comfy and cozy! I think he will be visited by one, maybe two more dogs before he leaves. He sure loves having the therapy dogs and gets disappointed when he misses them...more than missing athletes!!

Tomorrow in addition to his usual therapies, we start having our wrap-up meetings to go over discharge info for everything from equipment to meds to outpatient therapies to our next appointment here to stretches to school and everything in between! Lots of info, but because we are here everyday, we have lots of experience doing and seeing everything and that makes our teaching times shorter! We will have a lot of work to do ourselves once at home and I am sure his outpatient therapists will have their own list of stretches and other homework they will want us to do. I am almost overwhelmed with all the running around to various appointments and home workouts we will have to do. Keeping track of where I am when will be very important. I just keep focusing on the fact that we will all be starting from under the same roof and we will be eating all of our meals together again. The rest of it will fall into place.

While settling into bed, Alistair hit me with a major teary-eyed statement...I wish you guys could feel the pain I feel. Oh boy, what a loaded statement. It is true, we don't know the pain he is feeling - physically or emotionally. I told him that's true but if we could, we would take it all on for him in a heartbeat. When he says stuff like that or he struggles with something simple like stabbing a bite of food or complains about his arm not doing what it should be doing, I get sad and super pissed. Every once in a while the angry feelings rear their ugly head and I think about the "no fairs" and the "why hims." It makes me really sad to look at photos of Alistair, especially the ones so close to his surgery. I just look at him and think, "if we only knew what would happen." The ones that really get me are the ones we took morning of when we were on our way to check in and get ready. Huge feelings of guilt bubble up, I can barely look at those photos. I am glad he can't feel the pain that we feel. I hate that he has to have this struggle and that we can't do anything to make it instantly better. It will get better and it has gotten better way faster than anyone had hoped or believed. That is good and I have faith that this will all be behind us soon.