ChloeWatts.com

Tuesday, Mid-day 12/15/09

December 15th, 2009 Posted in Daily News Post

After a long day today, Dana is pretty wiped out. She only got 1½ hours in two different times for sleeping. I know the feeling but she’s in the middle of it all. Chloe is still pretty puny but Grandma is spending a lot of time quietly holding her hand and everyone is encouraging her. This is something everyone says we need to do… and something we have known from the start. That’s the easy part.

She is spending the day off the ventilator for as long as she can. Hopefully it will be all day and then she will go back on the assist tonight so she can get some quality sleep.

The doctors aren’t too concerned about her BP or heart rate since it goes up for short period of times and then comes back down to a reasonable rate. I haven’t heard about the most recent cultures on the suction to see how the infection is. The antibiotics should knock that out.

She had a bath today and then she spent some time with her hospital teacher Sami, a very nice African lady who has nothing but hope for Chloe. Her positive attitude is genuine and deep.

Speech therapy brought the talking keyboard back to the room for Chloe to have during her stay. She’s only spelled out her name so far but she did put two “e”s at the end so the pronunciation was correct by the machine. Before is sort of mushed the end of her name. The stroke has made it very difficult for her to get to the letters on the keyboard but you can see the determination on her face when she is trying. It will be much easier for her once she is able to sit up and put it on her lap. Right now we hold it in front of her and she hunts the letters down and punches them.

PT helped her into the recliner chair again today. It’s a hospital style recliner so it’s more like a tall bed that bends down at the knees resembling a real recliner. It’s one of those baby steps I have referred to. She will be taking many of those along the way.

Many of you have asked about timelines for her progression. There is absolutely no way of knowing for sure. Our first goal is to be on the unit ward by the end of this week. There is a lot more room and a little more freedom for all of us. We are still going to stick to very limited activity and people in the room though as we found too many last year really wore Chloe out fast. After that we will set more goals. I’d rather not be watching fireworks from the balcony like we did for the July 4th celebration of ’08. We aren’t going to rush anything though because good results are always better than quick results.

I’ll be so glad to get to see her again tomorrow. My cold was short lived thank God. I didn’t need a two weeker.

Thanks for being on the team, Team Chloe!

Blessings,
Ron