We are extremely happy and proud of mom’s progress, but we wanted to give some more details for everyone to better understand her range of abilities and needs.
Some days, she can urinate on her own. She is hooked up to a PureWick which is an external catheter. She is not walking to or using the toilet. Every 4-6 hours, a nurse must come in and straight/intermittent cath her. With her injury, she is not yet able to fully drain her bladder with just peeing. Leaving urine in the bladder can cause infections which is why they must straight cath her every few hours. They are using a straight cath rather than a folly to retrain her bladder to empty when it becomes full.
The same is happening with her bowel movements. She is still getting a suppository every day to get her bowels moving. The physical therapist informed us 2 days ago that the nurses needed to stimulate the area to truly make it work (hints the "they give good rectal here" on the home page).
The therapists are still working on getting her comfortable and healthy in a seated position. To do this, they are raising the top of her bed (chest, arms, and head) to a 60–75-degree angle and dropping her legs (as if she is sitting in a chair). As she is in this position, her blood pressure goes down and she becomes lightheaded. She is not able to maintain the position for very long until they must lower her back down to a laying down position. She is mostly resting between 15-30 degrees so we will continue working on raising her angle and keeping her blood pressure down.
As we have shared, she is moving more and more each day. When she was first injured, she had no movement below her head. Now she can do some of her therapy stretches on her own but still has trouble with others. She is raising her legs off the bed, moving them side to side on the bed and flexing her ankles. She is not able to walk and is still not feeling her legs. She is having more trouble moving her arms and hands. She has more mobility in her right hand than left (she is left-handed). Her fingers are making very small movements as she attempts to make a fist or squeeze our hands.
Most of her pain is in her shoulders and neck. She still feels numb in most of her body. She says it feels like everything is asleep. Her body becomes very stiff when it is not moving so, we have to make sure we are helping her stretch as often as possible.