Sunday update

Sunday we had this clever idea that we would go to campus, park at Violette, and walk to Pickler. We've done it before. The first time I remember well, because I had to give Linda a piggy-back ride to the car. This time, Linda took her 4-point cane, and Ellie came along.

Linda's walking was very good. It was smooth. It was fast. (Well, fast for her. Old people still make Linda look slow.) Her endurance held up for a long time, in fact all the way to the bell tower. At that point we made the mistake of walking in the shade.

We should have stayed on the sidewalk. A few feet on the brick walk under the bells and Linda was done in. It was totally a struggle from there. But we went to the library, and then Linda sat for about 30 minutes while Ellie and I checked out the video selection.

In the end, we checked out The Importance of Being Earnest, and Antz. Then we made the long arduous walk back to the car. It took a while, and we had to sit down and rest several times. But I didn't have to carry Linda.

We watched Antz first. I've seen it before, but I was still surprised by how real it seemed. The part of the movie where they decide to premptively strike a termite colony based totally on trumped-up intelligence reports could have been pulled straight from CNN.

Monday wasn't so bad and neither was Tuesday

After Sunday, Linda expected to be really tired on Monday still. In the end, she wasn't too bad. We went to speech therapy in the morning, and it was case conferences, so I went too. We reviewed some of Linda's progress, and they set new goals for her along with strategies for achieving those goals. She has major goals to improve her vocal range and her endurance.

On Tuesday, Linda noted that she still felt a little fatigue in her ankle from the walk on Sunday. But it didn't really hold her back. She had great therapies. I didn't notice; I was distracted by some reading.

I did take our old communication boards to show Linda's speech therapist. She was very impressed by our (my) creativity.

Cold or allergies

For those still interested in my cold (and amazingly, some people have been asking). I seem to have gotten over the head parts. I'm left at the asthma stage. All colds end like this for me, with a week or two of light asthma where I feel like I have to cough all of the time.

They make inhalers for this kind of thing, and mine generally helps for about 4 hours at a time. I learned something interesting about these inhalers recently though. They use sulfites as preservatives in them (as do beer and wine), and I recently began to suspect that I am allergic to sulfites. [My inhaler wore off this morning early, so I decided to check this. It turns out that they don't use sulfites in inhalers any more.]

So there's kind of a catch-22. Your allergies make your asthma worse, and your medication makes your allergies worse. I'm going to have to pay attention to see if my nose runs more after I take my inhaler...