China Day 7: Treatment Schedule Taking Shape

If a group of geese is called a gaggle, and a group of birds is called a flock – what is a group of Chinese doctors called? I have not figured this one out yet! Each morning we have a visit from the doctors and I am amazed at the size of the 'group'. Sometimes it is just a group of nurses that come and check Dan and other times we get the 'directors' in addition to the nurses. They always make sure that Dan can follow their finger with his eyes and that he is not in pain. They tap, they poke and then they say a bunch of stuff in Chinese-- and I just get a kick out of it.

The other thing that I love are the therapists. They smack Dan around a bit (tapping him between his shoulder blades and keep saying 'Your head... your head!” ) This indicates to him that he needs to keep his head straight up. I just laugh – it is great entertainment for me... the funny part is that if I ever tried to do this, I would get the evil eye, but Dan is good with the therapists, very obedient to their commands and I thoroughly enjoy watching the process!

We had pizza for lunch today – it was quite expensive given China's standards. I figured out it cost about $16 USD, which is quite a lot considering we get a Chinese breakfast for two for about $1.40 USD. We did have some leftovers, so we will use it for more than one meal, but it was kind of fun to see what Chinese pizza is like. (It is very similar to US pizza, but no sauce. They also sent a couple of packets of Ketchup with it – perhaps that was the sauce...!)

I put together a schedule of what a typical day looks like for us.

7:00 AM
Shower / breakfast
8:00 AM
IV / Speech exercises
9:00 AM
TCM - acupuncture
10:00 AM
Occupational therapy
11:00 AM
TCM - Chinese massage
12:00 PM
Lunch
1:00 PM
Speech therapy
2:00 PM
IV
3:00 PM
Physical therapy
4:00 PM
IV / Speech exercises
5:00 PM
IV
6:00 PM
IV

It varies a little bit, but this is the general schedule. Tonight Dan is still receiving IV treatments and it is almost 9:00 pm. He goes through about five to six bags of fluid a day.

We really like Dr. Guan, the Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor. We were talking and we mentioned that our biggest goal / hope was for Dan to have improvement in his speech. Ever since then, he will work with Dan on his pronunciation of words while he is doing the acupuncture and Chinese massage. I believe he also told the other doctors about it as we just got speech therapy added to the list of therapies today. We were just going to practice the lip motor exercises on our own, but now we have additional therapy to help Dan out in this area.

We will work tomorrow to set some specific goals for each type of therapy so that we can be 'laser focused' in our approach.

Thanks for all your support – we do appreciate the love and friendship that we feel. It makes all the difference for us.. :-)