The therapy heats up!

Dan is back in the swing of things and is really starting to ramp up on his therapy. Today we got a new piece of equipment in to help Dan work on improving his walking. It is a walker type device that supports his weight and can provide a workout similar to a harness / treadmill apparatus that is often found in therapy centers. The goal is to practice walking in a partial weight bearing situation to see if we can improve gait patterns.

Nathan helped put it together and we practiced at home for a while, but soon felt the need to expand to a larger area -- so here we are on our first day of "Up and Go" walking practice. We worked out at the church for about an hour, and that was after Dan had spent time at home doing some exercises in addition to two hours of physical therapy today.



Check out that leg movement! Good job Dan!


We are also getting approval for a speech therapist to start coming into the home. They called today and let us know that we were approved on our insurance and will come for an evaluation later this week. We are also anticipating getting another piece of equipment called a Quadriciser this week as well - this will really be a great benefit to Dan as it will stimulate him and give him range of motion therapy in addition to repetitive patterning -- this will be like having several therapists work on Dan at the same time - but it is all automated! We are really excited to get this and start working on it.

Just a note in closing - the men in our family REALLY like egg nog. We had a nice family time last night, and the boys came over and found Dan's egg nog in the refrigerator... needless to say they wanted some. Dan had to raise his eyebrows when he heard they were into 'his' egg nog... so they decided to trick him (see picture).





No -- egg nog does NOT kill stem cells - but we did have a good laugh over it. Laughter is good for the soul -- and it helps the healing process as well. Dan got the last laugh, though -- he drank all the egg nog!