Today my physical therapist took a chance and gave me crutches to try out, not in the conventional way but left crutch with right foot and vice versa. It went pretty well, I walked 150' on my first try and only really relied on the crutches for stability. After a couple of times I was leaning on them pretty hard and we had to move on to something else but I was told that we wouldn't use the walker anymore. If I do go home next week, I'll feel much more mobile using crutches than a walker and this takes a wheel chair completely out of the picture.
Eric
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
More Progress
Sunday I didn't have any therapy and it was terrific, a day to rest my body. On Monday I was ready to go. I did some more walking with the walker Monday and Tuesday, I'd been doing 100' at a time since Saturday. Today I kicked it up to 200'.
The doctors and therapists get together every Tuesday to discuss how patients are doing. Every week so far, United Healthcare has approved me for another week in the hospital or another week of therapy. When they discussed my progress this week, they thought that I may be able to go home as early as the end of next week but that would really require some pretty large steps for me to feel comfortable with that. They must have had the same thought because they kept my discharge date as 3/29, the day of my next chemo. The insurance contact here at RHI came in today and spoke with me, she had just gotten off the phone with UHC. They took a look at my progress and decided that they think I should be discharged next Wednesday. I guess this means that now my doctor is going to need to call each week and make a case for me to stay here if I'm not ready to go home on the 17th.
In OT this morning, they had me working on my hands by making me use a gigantic set of tweezers with a spring in them to pick up wooden blocks and move them from one box to another. Well I ended up pinching my hand and bleeding for an hour. Yet another motivation to get better so I can stop taking all of these pills, like the two blood thinners I'm on.
Eric
I forgot to mention, I got to try out some stairs today. I went up and down a set of 6 steps 3 times. This was a week before my therapist was planning on having me do them so again, positive things happening. I'm really starting to get excited about getting home, walking up the stairs and sleeping in my own bed.
The doctors and therapists get together every Tuesday to discuss how patients are doing. Every week so far, United Healthcare has approved me for another week in the hospital or another week of therapy. When they discussed my progress this week, they thought that I may be able to go home as early as the end of next week but that would really require some pretty large steps for me to feel comfortable with that. They must have had the same thought because they kept my discharge date as 3/29, the day of my next chemo. The insurance contact here at RHI came in today and spoke with me, she had just gotten off the phone with UHC. They took a look at my progress and decided that they think I should be discharged next Wednesday. I guess this means that now my doctor is going to need to call each week and make a case for me to stay here if I'm not ready to go home on the 17th.
In OT this morning, they had me working on my hands by making me use a gigantic set of tweezers with a spring in them to pick up wooden blocks and move them from one box to another. Well I ended up pinching my hand and bleeding for an hour. Yet another motivation to get better so I can stop taking all of these pills, like the two blood thinners I'm on.
Eric
I forgot to mention, I got to try out some stairs today. I went up and down a set of 6 steps 3 times. This was a week before my therapist was planning on having me do them so again, positive things happening. I'm really starting to get excited about getting home, walking up the stairs and sleeping in my own bed.
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