Progress?

On Saturday, I was able to be with Sam in Physical Therapy and she walked up 4 big stairs just by holding onto the handrail and with the PT holding onto her! She then walked down 7 small stairs. This was the first time I've seen Sam doing stairs and I was really impressed. Sam is absolutely amazing and is getting physically stronger. The therapists are also working on her balance and so I stood on one side of Sam holding her arm and the therapist on the other and Sam walked the length of the gym back/forth with a number of rests in between for almost a half hour. That too was amazing. Sam also decided to talk with us during therapy. I was surprised because Sam really hasn't been talking. In fact, this week I learned that Sam has not reached her goals in speech class and after two months of changing her goals and changing her medications, the Speech therapist, Meghan, has actually had to stop individual speech class with Sam. I was extremely upset, but Meghan said that this can happen with anoxic brain injuries. She said that Sam has great potential (unlike some of the other patients) and so might be back working with her in another month or so, and that they are monitoring her. Sam in fact still has her group speech therapy class along with all the other therapies and other type classes, such as tai chi/breathing class. It is true that Sam has been speaking very little on the weekends, but I just assumed that she was speaking more in her classes. This obviously was not the case. Sam also has developed a really bad problem with eating...or I should say not eating/spitting out her food. This problem has gotten worse over the last few weeks. I've asked the head nurse to see if the recent change in medication might be causing this, since it all seems to have happened around the same time. However, with all this said, Sam was speaking-up a storm on Saturday and even did karaoke on Sunday during the all day radio request show. The person in charge asked Sam to pick-out a Queen song and she picked out "Bicycle" . When the song was playing, Sam sang the chorus out loud every time..."Bicycle, Bicycle, I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike...I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like......We also were able to spend time on Saturday at Joan and Bill's apartment and Sam sat in the lazy boy chair, legs stretched out watching the big screen TV....she was so relaxed. It was wonderful to see her like that. We were able to be there for three wonderful hours and then returned to the facility. I do think Sam needs to get out for awhile and next weekend, Memorial day weekend, I will be bringing her home for a couple of days. After a really nice weekend with Sam, when I went to say goodbye to her on Sunday, she hugged me briefly and then pushed me away. I asked her if she was mad a me... and she said "yes". I said are you mad because I'm leaving you and she said "yes". I told her that if I could, I really would just want to be there with her and spend all my time by her side...she gave me a big smile and I gave her a big kiss.
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