Diana's post - Friday Feb.4

Hello Everyone...

Mom is very happy to be home...and we were very happy to get her home Monday before the blizzard hit! She is enjoying having some visitors. For those of you who have followed this blog and have seen her now...you're probably amazed (like we are) at the progress she has made. She looks great and seems to carry on a conversation pretty well. She still has problems with finding and getting out some words and ideas...and for those of you who would like to visit her...just be patient and give her time to think if she can't get the words out. We'd like for her to find those words and get them out on her own...however, we don't want her to get too frustrated either...sometimes it will come to her with a little bit of time. Speech therapy is working with teaching her to "talk around a word." If she can't think of a word...she thinks about other things relating to the word: category, function, properties, association, etc. and then it helps her to find that word.

We went to both out-patient OT and speech yesterday and formulated some goals for mom to work towards as well as got some new "homework" ideas to work on at home. She has been doing a little laundry and helping get food out for meals as well as helping with clean-up which is all good in getting her back to feeling more "normal" at home. No cooking yet...and she has been advised not to do that for awhile. Strangely enough, she has shown little interest in her computer so far...but we're hoping before long she will be shooting off some emails to some of you! We will be working hard on getting her to think of things to formulate sentences about... and then writing those ideas down. She is to start a daily journal and try to get some things down in writing. As she progresses in doing this, hopefully she will want to start doing some emailing again. We still see progress every day...Jamie said she was reading some things from the paper this morning...and then telling him about what she read. Very important that she understands what she is reading. That is something else we're working on...making sure she understands what she reads and what we're talking about in conversation. We've felt all along she understands what we talk about with her...but we forget that there are times when a word or words sound like a foreign language to her and she just might not completely understand. We might just rephrase it or repeat it for her and then she'll get it. The more I learn about the brain...the more amazing it is! The therapists have prepared us that now that she's home...we might be seeing some more frustration as she wants to be doing everything she used to do and can't. So we again ask for your prayers for patience and healing and thank you all for your support in so many ways.