Friday - Post op day 8

It has been another good day! The night was as awful as ever, and Daniel was awake for a big chunk of it, complaining that his legs were tickly / itchy. The physio gave us a good explanation of this today, to do with the nerves that have been cut etc. I think it's fairly normal, but the knowledge of that doesn't help him much in the middle of the night. He also had the usual problems with waking repeatedly, and needing rolling etc.

However, we allowed ourselves to sleep in this morning, since we didn't have therapy until 11, which was a nice relaxed start. After doing Daniel's exercises we made the trip down to the hospital, which is very easy now we have our hire car. Lucy came with us, as she was very keen to get in the siblings playroom, a complimentary and secure childcare facility for siblings (as you might guess from the name) at the hospital. It also gave Mum and Dad chance to get some of their jobs done before making the journey home tomorrow. Today we met Daniel's secondary physio Mike, known as 'Mad Mike' (someone we had heard lots about before we came over, since his fame crosses the Atlantic!) He was great and his confidence that Daniel could try certain things seemed to give Daniel confidence too. For the first time we managed to make the entire trip to and from the hospital, including the physio session, transfers in and out of wheelchair, and in and out of carseat, without him complaining he was in pain. Admittedly we had given him both ibuprofen and calpol first thing, so that will have had something to do with it, but it was a very good sign of progress.

During the therapy session Mike had him attempting  to climb on the therapy table (basically Mike did most of the work, but at least Daniel was up for trying). He also did some half-kneeling (like when you go down on one knee) while playing Connect 4, a bit of rolling, and at the end, some stepping back into his wheelchair (although with Mike bearing about 95% of Daniel's weight!) We also had chance to talk quite a bit about our queries about the home exercises, having first tackled them yesterday.

 

We went back to the hotel for some lunch, and then went out this afternoon to the Science Centre, a brilliant and very 'hands on' place, aimed at children. Like everywhere else here, it is free, and we all enjoyed it. There were massive moving models of dinosaurs, a tornado, fossils, and amongst other things lots of opportunities to build.

We built big arches (very appropriate for the St Louis theme....)

Also small arches.....

And in all cases, once we had built them, we knocked them down.........

Amazingly, considering our previous problems with wheelchair time, after 2 hours we had to drag Daniel away. He would happily have stayed longer.

We all ate in the apartment together this evening. Tomorrow we have to say goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa, as they travel back home. They have been an invaluable source of emotional and practical support to us over the last two weeks and we are incredibly grateful for everything they have done. We will certainly be sad to see them go.