Weekend Update

The Memorial Day weekend holiday was a great opportunity to relax on Kathy's first weekend back. Of course Kathy still had to do daily training work with stretching sessions and upper / lower body strength work. Twice a day we did stretching and added in strength for the upper body in the morning and strength for the lower body in the afternoon. We have also been closely monitoring Kathy blood pressure and heart rate as these are still slowly coming back to normal. She is still on two medicines to control them. We will ultimately need a doctors consent to release the meds, but the goal given to us by her therapy team at Kessler is to slowly wean her off them at home. As long as her blood pressure and heart rate fall within certain parameters she can take less and less of each medication. This has been going very well, and the meds are needed less often today than they were the day Kathy came home.

This past Thursday was Kathy's first day of outpatient therapy at Kessler. She will be working with two new therapists so thursday was a bit slow as both therapists did assessment of Kathy and got to know her. Additionally, Thursday proved to be a difficult day. Kathy told me that she woke up "pissed off" that this had happened to her. Being home and in her own space is good but seeing her family, friends, and neighbors outside enjoying the weather and season was upsetting because she can not fully share in that yet.

Of course Kathy proves daily that she is making great progress. Two key transitions already took place over this weekend. First, we decided to not use the walker inside the house, provided that someone is with Kathy to hold her hand and grab her belt area if she loses balance. Second, Kathy walked under her own power from her car, down the driveway, up the ramp to the front porch then into the front door! This was awesome for Kathy and it was obvious that development made her feel good about her progress.

We are looking forward to more gains over the next couple of weeks.