Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Monday, back to work!

We were back on schedule Monday with physical therapy from 12:00 to 2:00 and an injection at 2:30. Trish will actually be getting 3 injections each week for the next 2 weeks. Trish is doing awesome in therapy as they continue to work with her on moving her legs and also on her core strength and balance. The movement of her legs continues to amaze me. Here are some pictures of Trish working on her balance and core in therapy. They have her hold herself up on her knees using the workout ball to balance. This is extremely hard with virtually no abdominal muscles. It takes a lot of strength and concentration.

Here she is after working on this exercise for a while. They are really working her hard, but she loves it because she loves to push herself! With all the working out, Trish is developing a really tight muscle in her back, under her shoulder blade that is giving her a fair amount of discomfort. This same muscle actually locked-up on her when she was first in the hospital after her accident. We are doing lots of stretching to try and avoid this happening again. The therapists are very good not to push her too hard when it starts tightening and they help to stretch it out.

The therapists said that they will also work with Trish in the pool, so we will add that to our schedule next week. Even before coming here we have heard lots of positive things about pool therapy because of the minimal resistance that you have in a pool. This makes it much easier for your legs to move, if they can.

After therapy we grabbed some tortilla soup at the cafeteria for lunch and headed to the injection. They always have me put on a hair net and mask. Trish thought you all would like to see so here you go.

The injection went smoothly again and we were out of the hospital by 4:00 and headed back to the hotel. Trish laid down in the back seat to try and help prevent any headache. Back at the hotel Trish did her mandatory 6 hours of lying on her back. After 6 hours she sat up and was headache free! However, we don’t want to push things so we just went to bed for the night. Trish woke up Tuesday morning feeling good so we are looking forward to another good day of therapy.

Also, some of you have asked for the address where we are staying so I added it to the side bar. The addresses are very interesting here. They give directions and the often use landmarks, some of which aren't even here anymore. They are not true street addresses. For instance the hotel address indicates that we are 300 meters north of the ICE plant (power company) in San Jose, Costa Rica. A lot of other addresses refer to GPS coordinates.