Therapy - starting all over

We just got back from Linda's first outpatient therapy sessions. She had all three: speech, physical, and occupational therapy. Since it was her first day, everything was pretty much evaluative.

Speech was first, with Andrea. As coincidence would have it, I already knew her. She was the soprano that sat next to me when I sang in the choir in college. She ran Linda through lots of speaking drills, tongue exercises, and so on. A lot of them were ones she did at Rusk, so it was very familiar.

Chris was Linda's physical therapist. She did some leg and ankle stretching and observed how well Linda could do various movements. She had Linda walk, both with her walker and in the parallel bars. It sounds like one of her big goals for Linda will be to reduce the stiffness she has when she walks. It is difficult to walk well without a certain kind of flexibility and fluidity of movement.

The occupational therapist is David. He's the one Linda will get a crush on, because he's the only guy of course. He measured the strength and range of Linda's arms and hands very carefully. She has very good strength in many directions. She still has a lot of shoulder weakness, which is not unusual. He encouraged her to start doing "living tasks" with her left hand more. He said that will really make it come alive--right now it is lagging the right hand in terms of strength and ability despite being the first hand to "come back." We were starting to focus on the left hand more at Rusk as well, so this is not unexpected.

Everyone was pleased to see how well she was doing so quickly after such a severe injury.

All in all, Linda said it was almost exactly what she expected for a first session. She is finding it a bit difficult mentally to be starting up therapy again. The long hard slog of rehabilitation feels long and hard today. It will get better when the therapists start feeling more like friends and less like clinicians. As friendly as Linda is, that won't take long.