Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Wow, I can’t believe how well Paul is progressing since I updated you last Thursday! He’s been alert and talking and cooperative ever since, and he seems to get better each day. At first he seemed kind of frantic, exaggerating his expressions, but each day he becomes more calm and intentional. Before I explain more, I have a little story to tell:
There it was, straight from his mouth! He feels out of sorts because he’s still so confused and frustrated.
When the two hours were up, instead of trying to climb out of bed for the wheelchair ride he’d been promised, he turned to his side and started to curl up.
Jomania had been reclining on the bed beside him (there was only one chair for us), and Paul reached behind and found her arm and pulled it in front of him to snuggle, and he closed his eyes and sighed (pictures to the right).
Paul’s eating now!
Reaching out to family . . .
Paul has been enjoying chats on the phone with his Dad and brother Mark as shown on the left.
Yesterday Mark and his wife Jill and their daughter Thea put together a great video for Paul – I can’t wait to show it to him! I won’t be surprised if Paul doesn’t recognize or appreciate it at first, but the nice thing about having the video is that we can show it to him again as he becomes more aware.
He couldn’t understand why he had to be imprisoned there. When we tried to explain what happened and showed him the story and newspaper clipping, he thought the guy who ran over him looked familiar, but nothing more, and he couldn’t believe he’d been injured and needed to heal.
I can’t believe it – well, I can believe Paul’s finally home, what I can't believe is that he’s home and has recovered SO much . . . AND continues to improve at such a speedy rate! Just 3 weeks ago, I thought we wouldn't see this for a year (if then!).
The rest of the afternoon and evening was a delight!
We went to buy him a new laptop and then went to his favorite sushi place (for weeks, he'd been talking about taking us out to dinner there!), followed by scandalously delicious donuts. At the restaurant, the people were glad to see him back again but he didn't know them, and couldn't remember what kind of sushi he liked.
However I was amazed that, as we drove from place to place along some complicated routes (we didn’t know where some of the places were ourselves), he was able to direct us accurately -- it made his orientation-and-mobility-instructor mom proud!
Last night when Fred and I took him to dinner (picture to the right) to let Jomania have a night to herself, he said that on a scale of 1 to 100, he was a -50, and now he is a 75. I think that’s a pretty realistic assessment! And he’s more patient with us and himself as he struggles to remember and to explain things – he seems to understand that he’s getting better. And he’s showing good judgment when we are out, putting our mind more at ease about him doing something irrational and unsafe.
And thankfully there are things that were relatively unaffected by the injury, such as his ability to navigate and to read, and his computer skills.
Yesterday Jomania and I were stumped looking on the internet to find and print out a form for his disability insurance, and guess who came to the rescue?
He not only was resourceful in finding it, he then figured out that the reason it wouldn’t print is that a wire had been disconnected!!!!
Before I go on, I'll share the great news. Ever since Paul became lucid, he has been concerned primarily about the cats that he had been fostering before the injury. Well, Friday he and Jomania went to Baltimore with Jomania's brother-in-law George and his cousin Habib to get them, and SUCCESS -- the cats are now at home with Paul! Thank you George and Habib!
"I am normal, it’s just that my brain doesn’t let me think!" Paul mused last Wednesday, although he didn’t remember saying it a few minutes later when I scrambled for something to write it down.
That's one of the cheers I heard from Paul and his dad, who are in the next room enjoying a Steelers game again, as they used to do every week, yelling cheers and expletives (apparently this game isn’t going well -- I hear more expletives than cheers, and things like "OMG, they suck so bad!").
I agree! He still has trouble remembering words and numbers, and I sometimes need to remind him to keep focused without rambling, but he seems to have no trouble understanding anything, from working on his finances for his tax report, to figuring out what’s wrong with his plumbing and how to fix it (although he does have trouble understanding how the Steelers can be so inept!).
To the right is a picture of him helping me understand what we have to do with our TV to stream movies off the internet.
