Another Day in Panama City

As expected today was a relatively easy day. Trish had physical therapy in the morning where she spent a lot of time standing and showing the therapist here how she stands in her walker without using her hands once she's up with her knees blocked. He was very impressed and said in his year and a half working with spinal cord injuries here in Panama he has never seen someone injured at her level do something like that! She also worked hard with some new exercises. She had fun and always works so hard.

After therapy we headed back to the condo for a bit and were able to see a couple of ships headed to the canal entrance.




Later we met up with a couple of friends at one of the malls here is town. The mall is very modern and we plan to go back and walk around when we have some more free time.

This is William. He's such a great guy and has been very accomodating to us and very helpful with anything we need. He arranged our condo and will help us plan our tourist excursions!

These are our friends Holly and Raj. Holly is down here for treatments for her MS, and we were also in Costa Rica together last year. It's such a coincidence that we were here at the same time again.

The mall is right across the street from the Stem Cell Institute so we crossed the street for Trish’s IV, which went really well.

The Stem Cell Institue is located on the 1st floor of this building.

This is Dr. Hernandez injecting the stem cells through the IV. Here he is telling Trish exactly what kind of cells, what their purpose is, and how many are being injected.

After the IV we headed home and decided to make a trip across the street to the grocery store (which is in bottom floor of the mall). Now when I say crossing the street, I don’t mean finding a cross walk and waiting for he light to turn. This means risking life and limb to get to the other side. The traffic here is crazy, there doesn’t appear to be any rules. Anyway, we made it across and through the mall only to find out that the grocery store was closed. We asked a worker in the mall when they open and his response was that he didn’t know but that they were closed yesterday too. He wasn’t sure when they would open again! I guess we’ll try again tomorrow!

We are headed out to dinner tonight with Dr. Ugalde, we are really excited to go out with him! He told Trish earlier that they got lots of great stem cells out of her bone marrow and they look great!