The Artist

My husband, Tim, was a police officer.  Of course, he is retired now.  However, prior to his accident and while he was still actively working, he held several positions on the job.  They ranged from patrolman, training officer, accident investigator, detective and sketch artist.  One of his favorite jobs was being a sketch artist.  Actually one of  his favorite things is art.  He took classes in high school and even studied at the Art Institute of Chicago.  He has painted some pictures, but he liked charcoal and drawing the best.  (I even have an unfinished drawing of me!)

He originally took his first class when he was working at his first police department.  They sent him to a school in Wisconsin.  He became that department's composite artist.  Later when he joined the police department in Arlington Heights, they sent him to a school at Northwestern.  He was good previously, but he became really good after the school at Northwestern.  (In my opinion.)

When our kids were young, he went to one of their classes to talk about being a police officer.  (My husband was a one man show, between his career and playing the bagpipes!)  He had one of the children get up and and describe someone in the classroom.  When he was finished, he showed the picture to the class and the children were amazed.  It looked exactly like one of their classmates.  He gave it to the child as a souvenir.

What he drew did help catch several criminals.  In fact his police department lent him out to Chicago.  However, Tim was and still is very humble.  He would say to me that it is not his pictures that are good, it's how good his witness was.

Tim was right handed.  Since his accident, he does not have use of his right hand anymore.  It really did not take him too long to learn to use his left hand.  I have always told him that he was a "closet" lefty.  His printing is beautiful, although his signature is a little shaky, it looks pretty darn close to the one he did with his right hand.

Today, for whatever reason, we were talking about this.  I guess it was because I happened to find a few of his sketches while I was looking for something.  He reminisced about while he was still at RIC, one of his therapist asked him about drawing.  They gave him a pencil and he sketched her. Soon, several of the therapist wanted him to sketch them.  One of them asked him how he could do this, especially with his left hand.  He told me that he explained to them, that it is not in your hand.  It's what is up in your head that allows your hand to do it.  How profound for a man with a traumatic brain injury to bring up to a therapist!

It is all of our hope, that when he is good and ready, that he will once again try his "hand" at art.  Perhaps something small and then move up to a painting or two.  Or may even finish that drawing of me!

Music Therapy or Not?

The other day I watched the 20/20 interview with Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly.  I was so touched by this interview.  However, it visually brought back so many memories of my husband's injury, hospital stay and rehabilitation.  It really was a remarkable interview. Gabrielle Giffords is truly an amazing woman as all the many people out there recovering from a brain injury are.  So much hard work is involved for them and every bit of progress whether it be large or small is astonishing.

On my phone I have a dictionary app which gives you a word of the day, every day.  I really enjoy it as not only do I get a word of the day, there is always some little anecdote.  Today's anecdote was about Gabrielle Giffords and how music helped her relearn words.  She was injured on the left side of the brain near the area that controls language.  It said that recovery specialists have started using music to help patients recover their language ability. Even though we understand and create language on the left side of our brain, we understand music primarily on the right side .  The way the brain relates to music is very unique.  When we have a song stuck in our head or listen to a song by imagining it, our brain is very active as if we were really listening to that song.  Neuroscience research has shown that music has an incredible impact across the entire brain. Because music relies on pitch and rhythm in addition to speech, it is interpreted in different parts of the brain, not solely the music or language areas.  When rehabilitating injured patients, rather than trying to redevelop the language area directly, this therapy retrains the connections in the brain and creates a new language area in the music region of the brain.

After watching the interview and then reading this information on my phone, I can't help but think that even in the short amount of time since my husband's injury, there is still so much progress being made.  I found this most fascinating as I remember when my husband was just learning how to learn to talk again, there was no music.  We were not allowed to play music or turn on the TV or do anything that would over stimulate him.  I wonder if he would have made faster progress if we could have added music?  I guess we will never know as his speech is pretty good at this point in time.

However, we were talking about this today.  I told him they should have allowed us to play music and sing to him.  He just laughed.  My husband was always involved with music being a piper in a bagpipe band.  But as he reminded me, he never sang.  You see, anyone who knows me knows I am the one who sings all the time to myself.  He marvels at the songs that just seem to pop into my brain.  He said that if they allowed us to play songs and sing to him, he probably would have run screaming from the room and never want to talk again.  Maybe in his case it was a good thing he had just the traditional speech therapy!

Teamwork continued...

We arrived home mid afternoon from our very long excursion to the hospital for a simple procedure.  I think the GI Lab was happy to see us leave as we had been there for so long occupying a room I think they wanted to use.  The ride home was not without excitement.  Tim coughed most of the way home and his right leg kept having spasms every five minutes.  I've seen his arm do this when he gets fatigued, but never his leg.  By the time we got in the door at home, we were so pooped.  (Ha ha ha ...no pun intended again!)  Tim said he was tired and a little chilly.  He sat down in his chair and pulled a blanket up over himself.  We were both hungry, but I think we were just more tired than anything.  So I made us both a mini bagel with cream cheese and then we agreed a nap was in order.  A good hour and a half had passed and I got up to do a few things around the house.  Tim was still asleep.  Suddenly I heard his voice call out to me, saying he thought he had a fever.  Now I couldn't imagine why he thought that, but I popped a thermometer in his mouth.  By golly, he did have a fever!  It was 102.5.  The switch in my mind flipped on and I thought, he should not be running a temperature after a procedure.  So I dialed the doctor's office.  I really wasn't sure which doctor to call, so I called his PCP first.  They told me to call the doctor who did the procedure, which I then did.  He told me to get Tim to the ER immediately.  Now, I am not one to get ruffled very quickly, so I responded that I just gave Tim a couple of Tylenol and did he think I should wait to see if his temp goes down.  The doctor, in an authoritative voice, told me to get him to the ER now and if I couldn't drive him there, he would call an ambulance.  So off we went, back to the hospital that we had just left two and a half hours previously.  

As we arrived, there is no longer parking in the ER.  You can pull up and drop off someone and then park in the lot down behind the ER.  My husband, of course, would not let me drop him off.  He wanted me to park and then push him in his wheel chair back up to the ER.  Up being the key word.  You see the parking lot is down hill from the entrance to the ER.  So by parking in the lot first, I then had to push him up to the entrance.  By the time I got him in the door, the nurse asked me if I was the one who needed to be seen!  I told her I just needed to catch my breath, which in a moment I did!  They actually were waiting for him and immediately took him into a room to be seen.  All the ER standard procedures took place.  They took blood, a chest x-ray, a cat scan and hooked him up to a monitor.  His pulse by this time was 127 and his blood pressure was 96/49. His fever was coming down (thanks Tylenol), but they were concerned with his vitals.  

This sounds like this was all lickety-split, but it really was done over a course of several hours.  They had now hooked him up to fluids and IV antibiotics.  He had an infection, but they were not sure where yet and were waiting for test results to come back in.  By this time it was getting so late, I was hoping they would just admit him as I wasn't relishing taking him back out to the car in the middle of the night and bringing him home.  Finally they made the decision to keep him.  They were going to send him up to a monitored floor, since his vitals were still off.  Since he was off his coumadin, several thoughts of what was going on with him passed through the doctors minds.  But the official diagnosis was aspiration pneumonia.  He had quickly turned into one very sick little cookie.  Evidently when he was having trouble breathing on the table during his procedure when they had to intubate him, he aspirated.  Bacteria then flowed directly into his lungs which didn't take long to spread like wild fire.  Thankfully, it wasn't a pulmonary embolism or a punctured colon like they originally thought.  Tim has had pneumonia so many times in his life, we figured this was just another notch in his belt buckle!  

While in the ER, he finished off two bags of antibiotics.  When he was moved up to his room, the IV antibiotics continued.  It was now way past midnight and he continued to get admitted.  The nurse's came in, followed by the residents, followed by more nurses who were trying to get him settled in.  He was so tired by this time and I was exhausted too.  He just wanted to go to sleep.  I decided to say good night to him and go home.  He was comfortable and I knew he would be well taken care of.

As tired as I was, I was also very very hungry.  Now where do you go for food at 1:30 am?  Why McDonald's of course!  It was probably the strangest thing I've done in a long time, going through the drive through in the middle of the night.  However, the staff was extraordinarily talkative.  I learned that the lady taking my money had just moved here from Atlanta and was not enjoying our chilly weather!  I think I was delirious at this time and just smiled and took my food and left.

Finally the end of one hell of a day.  Tim stayed in the hospital for a couple of nights and was discharged home to my care once again.  He had to restart his coumadin which was now a bit out of line, but we could manage this.  He needed to take oral antibiotics for a week and make several trips to his doctor's office.  But today he is home and making a good recovery.  He's tired, still has a bit of a cough, but he's good.  Oh and that polyp they removed during his procedure (which now seems eons ago, although it was just last week) was benign.  So a good end to a colonoscopy gone wild!  

And above anything else, we are still one hell of a team!

Teamwork

The definition of teamwork -"coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team in the interests of a common cause."   Synonyms are alliance, assistance, joint effort, partnership, pulling together and unity, to name a few.

I have never given much credence to the word before like I do now.   Of course in the period of time that I have worked, I have been to many a training or workshop that centered around "team building."  You go and sit through many a speaker and get up and do several exercises in the art of "team building or teamwork".  You preach it to your staff and you write about it in your newsletters.  I live it!

My husband has been through and stills lives through an ordeal. He cannot do anything normal like he has before.  Every little thing that you or I take for granted, requires assistance in one form or another.  He has very little use of his right arm, so I have become the left.  We are a partnership through thick and thin.

Case in point, he just went in for a routine procedure, a colonoscopy, that test that we as adults are supposed to have when we reach the 50 mark.  So he's a little behind (no pun intended) in that area. He is 55.  He kind of lost the last five years.  So we scheduled it.  Now, he actually had one earlier this year, which was sort of uneventful.  Except that he takes coumadin and did not go off of it the first time around.  The doctor gave him several options at the time and was confident that they probably would not find anything.  Wrong!  This is Tim, remember, nothing is ordinary.  The prep he used was not really good enough, but the doctor did find a small polyp.  So he needed to reschedule another one in six months to a year.  For the next one, Tim would have to go off his coumadin for five days prior to the procedure and do a two day prep.  (Now anyone who has had one knows just how thrilling a normal prep for this procedure is.  Imagine a two day prep!)

Tim reached the perfect mindset and decided he was ready to do this again.  Off to the doctor we went and got all our instructions, got the day scheduled and we were ready.  I bet you never thought that prepping for a colonoscopy required joint effort, teamwork!  For Tim it does, remember the definition above!  I had everything laid out on the counter for him.  I read the instructions, he read them too.  We were planned out right down to the hour, first with day one, then moving on to day two.  He was down to the drinking of all that solution.  (I put it into 6 water bottles for easy access for him to drink, as he had to start while I was at work.)  You all know what happens next, or is supposed to happen.  Well it didn't.  It didn't the first time and it didn't the second time.  For me, when I had this procedure, I was done and cleaned out in several hours.  For Tim, he started at 3:00 pm and I'm not sure how well it was working for him even by bedtime.  Oh well!

The next morning, we were up at 5:30 am getting dressed and ready to go.  Tim needed to be at the hospital by 7:30 am.  His procedure was scheduled for 8:30 am.  So off we went, piece of cake so far.  He registered, got called in, got undressed and was awaiting his turn.  The nurse got him hooked up to an IV, the anesthesiologist talked to him and lastly the doctor was ready. Off he went and off I went for a cup of coffee. (Remember an earlier post...coffee addiction!)  Very shortly later they called me in and the anesthesiologist told me that during the procedure, Tim had some breathing difficulties.  So he had ordered him an albuterol treatment.  The doctor came out and talked to us and said that Tim scared the wits out of him during the procedure.  As suspected he wasn't as clean as he should be, he also was having such a hard time breathing that they had to intubate him.  He was able to snag the polyp but really could not scope him as well as he would have liked.  The doctor wanted Tim to be watched by the nurses and continue on oxygen for a while.  We, of course, were not in any hurry. So we ended up hanging around for several more hours.  During the course of this time, Tim had a second albuterol treatment.  He was pretty raspy and coughing quite a bit.  His original recovery nurse was going to lunch, so her replacement came in, looked at Tim and deemed him OK to go home.  That is all my husband had to hear.  We pulled it together and went home.  Phew....what a day so far.   A simple procedure that for most of us is done and over in a couple of hours.  To be continued...

A New Way of Walking!

"Walk right in, sit right down

Daddy, let your mind roll on

Walk right in, sit right down

Daddy, let your mind roll on

Everybody's talkin' 'bout a new way of walkin'

Do you want to lose your mind?

Walk right in, sit right down

Daddy, let your mind roll on!"  (Music performed by a variety of musicians.)

If you are our age, you might remember this song!  However the words seem to ring true for Tim.  In March of 2008 he started at a completely new rehab facility.  It was close to home and strictly out patient.  It was one hour sessions and the only thing they concentrated on was walking.  The style of these physical therapists was no nonsense, come in, sit down and let's get to work.  And boy did he work.  Tim's goal was always to be able to walk again and not with a walker, but with a cane.  He was told in the past that he would not be able to do this.  A single cane was out of the question.  He could take some steps with a walker, perhaps they could teach him to use a four pronged cane...but this is not what he wanted.  He wanted to walk with a single cane.  He expressed this desire to his new physical therapist.  So without batting an eye, she said, "If you want to do this, I will make sure you do this."  The first part of this new way of walking was getting Tim to be able to stand alone and balance.  She pushed and he practiced.  (And I mean she was really pushy!)  But whatever she did, Tim followed and absolutely thrived!  Part of this therapy was also addressing his arm/hand issue.  It was so tight, he could not use his hand to help hold him steady,  So she talked to the resident occupational therapist. There was a new type of therapy that just came out, using a dynamic splint and she wanted to try it out on Tim.  He agreed.  Part of using this splint was being able to stand upright and using his right hand, move spongy balls back and forth between buckets.  Piece of cake for you and I.  Not so easy for Tim.  However between his excercises with his physical therapist and doing this work out, (and I am not kidding about it being a work out!) Tim for the first time in years was able to stand alone up right, balanced and looking good.  Loose his mind...did he ever.  It is hard for me to ever imagine not being able to do a simple thing like just stand up.  We take it for granted, but Tim was so pleased.  Now that he could stand, the next step was to take a step.  More pushing and pulling and walking, yes walking with a cane.  He wanted to do it and he finally did after these nine months of intense therapy.  Now, he doesn't walk fast or far or perfect, but his can go several feet with a cane and he is the happiest man in the world. 

With this new ability, daily tasks became easier, transfering became easier, going to the bathroom became easier.  It opened up a whole new world of independance.  (I'm getting ahead of myself with exhuberance!)  He went from being totally wheel chair bound to a bit more free.  He can now walk from our back door to the car without the need of a wheel chair.  It is certainly easier on me with out having to lug his chair.  He can walk from the family room to his bathroom and out into the kitchen.  He still needs the wheel chair as he can't ambulate great distances, but he achieved his goal and that is what he wanted to do.

And then one more thing....

So with Tim home and therapy going well, variety of hospital stays due to ups and downs, our life has certainly changed from the normal routine.  It is evident that the way we were and the life we had when we took that trip to the Bahamas 2 weeks before Tim's accident would never return.  But that's OK because we were now prepared to meet all the new challenges that would come our way.  Tim had a goal in mind.  He never dwelled on the past.  We fondly referred to him as the new Tim and the old Tim.  Old Tim was the way he was prior to the accident.  New Tim is the way he is now.  Always a fighter, but definately with a personality change, but a good change.  So we continued on.

However, in July of 2007, I was not prepared for what happened next.  (Although, who is ever prepared for catastrophic occurances?) My aunt, who I have always been very close to, suffered a devastating stroke.  I received a call from her work saying that she did not come into work yet, nor were they able to reach her.  They had called 911 and one of the ladies who works with her was going to stop by her apartment to check on her.  I decided to run over there as well.  When I got there, she was laying on the floor.  The paramedics were also there.  They were going to take her to the hospital.  I called home to let them know what happended and followed the ambulance to the hospital.

Once she was there, it was confirmed that she had a stroke and it was a pretty bad one.  She remained in the hospital for a while and was eventually transferred to a nursing home/rehab facility.  She stayed there, but really was not making any progress.  I am her power of attorney, as well as her son.  However he lives in Florida and she is here in Illinois.  So it was up to me to take care of her needs here.  I tried to do the best for her, however, Medicare only allows a 3 month stay in a nursing home facility.  We had to make a decision where she was going to go from there.  I could not take her to my home, as I was already taking care of my husband.  She was unable to go to Florida.  So we decided to bring her home to her apartment and hire a live-in to care for her to see how it would go.  She needed 24/7 care and even with the live-in care, she needed more.  It was a bit of a struggle for me at this time, trying to coordinate her needs, my husband's needs and remain sane.  From the stress, I also developed shingles.  My doctor, (who was also her doctor), suggested I find a nursing home for her.  I began the search not knowing really where to look.  One of the officers that my husband worked with suggested I contact his wife as she worked in a very nice local nursing home.  I followed through on that suggestion and filled out all the necessary paperwork for her to get admitted.  They called on a Friday and we had her settled into her new residence by Monday.  My cousin came in and helped clean out her apartment.  We closed out her lease and settled all her accounts.  She remains in this wonderful, caring facility until this day.  With peace of mind, I was able to go back to being my husband's full time caregiver!