Time Off...

I've been at my parent's house since late Christmas day and will probably be returning home on January 5th. I don't expect to have any opportunities to advance the narrative during my time away, so I'll get back on track during the weekend of the 6th.

Accident History: Part 8

Although I was projected to be serving at least a three to five month tenure, I cleared inpatient rehab in only a single month. During that time I was engaged in a varied assortment of physical, occupational, and speech therapies. I had to relearn an impressively basic array of both physical and cognitive skills, and things were tough going, especially at first.

Having been fed and hydrated through tubes and an IV throughout the entire ordeal, I had to be taught how to swallow whole food and liquids again. As my trache was slowly downsized and eventually removed, I also spent a substantial amount of time learning how to speak again. Through the use of some very basic visual puzzles, my speech therapist and I also played games designed to stress memory and simple associations, all in the service of spurring on my cognitive recovery.

Admittedly, I had an incredibly difficult time staying awake during the first week or two of speech therapy. In addition to the cognitive focus of the "brain games," this was where I did a variety of odd exercises to strengthen my swallowing reflex and worked on enunciating various words while coping with a bandaged hole in my throat post-trach removal.

I had to relearn basic locomotion in physical therapy, covering the spectrum of learning to sit up under my own power all the way to standing and walking around with a cane. Manual dexterity and other functional movements were the province of my occupational therapies, which tended to center on things like cooking safety or exercises designed to return my right arm to its fully-functioning and dominant role.

Suffice it to say that I managed to push through my rehabilitative tasks in extremely good time, but I would be remiss in claiming a purely personal triumph. I had an amazing support system of family and friends: my nuclear family was a near-constant presence, and my Mom actually took work off to stay with me during the day and wheel me around to my various therapies and other on-site appointments. Some extended family members and several very good personal friends also visited me, which certainly had a very uplifting effect.

An incredibly skilled and compassionate team of doctors, therapists, nurses, and orderlies tended to my ensemble of needs, and they can (along with my family and friends) lay claim to most of my inpatient success. Without them all of my personal efforts would have meant little; their caring and capable professionalism provided me with all the tools necessary to facilitate my immediate recovery and enter the next phase: outpatient rehab.

A Change of Direction

Now that I'm on break and have had some time to reflect, I've reached something of a crossroads in the narrative's direction. I have been overly preoccupied with retelling the scope of my bodily destruction thus far, and while that is certainly of incredible personal importance to me, such a focus obfuscates the true spirit and intent of my foray into the Blogosphere.

Instead, this therapeutic outlet was intended as a way for me to share some of my more meaningful introspections, and while a certain degree of context is essential to properly frame and legitimize my story and related thoughts, anything beyond that undermines my primary purpose. So, in light of this, the historical narrative is soon to be concluded, with its remainder built almost entirely on a fairly skeletal rendition of the past two or so years; more detailed, specific information will be mostly confined to the role of providing sufficient background for my various musings.