Day 12 – The Upswing – Monday, April 17

I am going to drift away from the time-based updates and switch to just free-form writing. When we were monitoring progress on an hour-by-hour basis, it made sense to track when things were done and who was doing them, but at this point we have moved more to daily goals and activities.

Cyndie and Wade spent the night and the first half of the day with Sue. She had a good night and seemed to sleep well. She woke up a couple of times during the night, but used her “call button” to get the nurse rather than disturb Cyndie who was right next to her. (A good sign of independence, as well as

It’s a day of little ups and little downs, but a positive day so far.

The biggest negative is that we seem to have taken a 180° with our doctors. When we were upstairs in the ICU, we had a very aggressive doctor, Dr. Z, that we loved and completely agreed with on Sue’s outlook – she needs a challenge and is up for it. Now that we have moved downstairs into recovery, our doctor is way more conservative, and has set all kinds of hurdles that Sue needs to overcome here in the hospital before she will release her to the rehab center. That is disappointing, so in true family fashion, we are fighting it and going to get her out of there sooner rather than later. I mean, c’mon, the bed has wheels and I have a van. I can make this happen with or without them. (Just kidding.) 😉

She was sleepy and lethargic for part of the day that Kim and I were there, but we sat her up and she perked right up. That was good, because we got to spend some time with her telling her the things that were going on with the move, her CT scans and how she needed to up her game with the rehab – with the therapists, with us, and by herself. We spend a little time with her working on holding her head up (still a bit of a struggle, but she was doing well), and then lifting her arm.

At one point, Kim was talking to her and trying to get her to work on her vocabulary. She was not responding, so Kim asked her, “Are you just pretending to sleep so I stop bothering you?” To which Sue nodded yes. Yep, that is the Sue we know and love.

We left around 5:30PM to attend to some other obligations, but Cyndie and Wade got there around 6:00PM and will be spending the night with her.

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