Update #43

Today was another great day. Ryan went to PT. He walked the length of the parallel bars three times again today. They used a brace on his left leg to help keep in straight. This helps him get more strength when shifting his weight from his right leg to his left.

The therapist gave Ryan a second wheelchair. It is shorter and doesn't have a headrest. He has much more head and neck control now, and she wants him to build up strength in those muscles. She had him sit in the new chair and propel himself down the hall using his right leg. He was cruising! She was in a short rolling chair and had to work to keep up with him. I could tell she was impressed. (Soon, Ryan and I will be doing chair races down the hall.)

Ryan didn't have OT today, but KT worked with him for a good amount of time. They did resistance exercises with his arms and legs. Ryan more than made up for yesterday in today's session. He was pulling a lot with his left arm during one of the exercises. He impressed KT so much that he wants to add a second therapy session to Ryan's schedule in the afternoons.

Speech therapy did an exercise with Ryan where they held up cards that only Ryan could see with images on them. They held up ten cards and asked Ryan to say what each image was. (So, she would hold up a card with a picture of a table on it. And he needed to correctly pronounce the word table.) Another therapist and I had to interpret what he was trying to say. He was able to verbalize understandably nine out of ten images to us. Her goal was only for him to correctly verbalize three out of ten. As usual, he blew her goals out of the water.

She is also going to do some swallowing tests with Ryan this week using ice chips. I'm looking forward to seeing how he does. :)