Today's Progress

I got to the rehab place about 1:00pm on Thursday and Mom was sitting in her bed just hanging out.  She checked her oxygen level - 98% - and told me that she had a fairly uneventful and just a little boring time in occupational therapy.  There was a lot of taking things off of bulletin boards and putting them back on.  It seems like almost every activity in there involves doing something and then undoing it.  There may be some larger subtext in there preparing some of the older folks for their eventual unraveling, but for people like Mom, it's just kinda stupid and boring.  The silver lining in these dumb little tasks is that Mom has to do most of them standing up, so she gets practice at that.

Soon, she was fetched to come down to physical therapy with Dawn.  Dawn is the one she works with the most, but there are several PTs there that help out.  Dawn decided to push her a bit more today and Mom made some real breakthroughs.

The first thing she did involved walking up two steps, turning around and walking back down.  The last time she tried this, she got a little weak in the knees and had to sit down on the steps before she completed the exercise.  Today was very different.  She went up and down the two stairs a grand total of four times, meaning she went up and down eight steps.  Not consecutively - there was a little breather break in between each pair - but Dawn said that it was the equivalent of eight steps.  She is trying to prepare her for the five steps that lead to our front door.

The next series of exercises involved the use of some uneven parallel bars.  Mom had done one of these exercise before (the first one below walking back and forth with one arm on the bar) but the other two were very new.

This next one was the first of the new exercises and it involves a little side-step along the bar and back.  See for yourself:

Finally, this is the exercise that gave Mom the most confidence and the biggest boost to her spirits.  These knee bends are no small feat for her.  Just a week or two ago, her knees would have buckled the first time she tried something like this.  Needless to say when she got done with this, she felt pretty good about herself.