Friday!!

HA, Fridays don't mean as much to me right now, since I'm not working! But, they DO mean I have therapy at Helping Hands here in Laffy. I love going because I see improvements that I don't necessarily see at home.

I can now grip a 3# weight with my right hand and a 6#er with my left - woohoo! ;) Plus, my PT is an incredibly sarcastic German named Wulf that tends to rub off on the other workers and patients, which makes it a fun place to go to. He's quite good at pinpointing exactly my problem - my worst one is that my right rectus femoris (quads) won't stop firing, making it hard for my weak hamstrings to overcome to bend my knee. This is caused by the spinal cord injury, as the rectus keeps trying to talk to my brain via my spinal cord, but the message gets all garbled due to the injury. Therefore he has me skateboarding for at least an hour a day! Well, I sit at the computer or read a book or whatever, and put the skateboard under my right foot, and roll it back and forth and back and forth. This repetitive motion helps my hamstrings gain strength and eventually overcome the quads some.

My OT Simonne focuses on my upper body, so basically my shoulders and arms. Seems that I'm going to get out of here with a better posture than I had before! My shoulders get a lot of knots in them from a similar process as my quads, but I can stretch them out. My triceps and pecs are tight which is typical for the location of my injury. My hands are incredibly weak and my flexors are getting stronger than my extensors, which gives me "claw hands" that are also typical of para (tetra) palegics. My left extensors are getting strong enough to overcome that, so that hand's still weak but healing at a good rate. This is not true of my right though, so we're doing electrical stimulation on that one to help it out. I also wear a brace on it to keep the fingers extended, and stretch all the extensors in my arm out to help. Until that nerve heals though, I may never get it back to normal.

We're interviewing tentatively with a local tv station after that, and Snakebyte has his first soccer practice of the year, hooray! First game tomorrow.