Thursday, 20 November 2008

Instinctive movement

Jo was up at 08:30 for breakfast, only going up for a siesta at 13:30. The physiotherapists came at 14:00 and got her up. It was a mixed session. The assistant manipulated Jo's hand on the bed and got her to raise it to her nose and up to the ceiling, using the right hand. This proved difficult at first, as the elbow joint is stiffening up. Jo has not been doing this exercise, which is bad.

Down in the gym they got Jo to stand four times, each time from a progressively lower position. Jo did not have her heart in it and the stands were perfunctory at best, as if Jo was doing it for our benefit, not her own. The physiotherapist did get her to step twice but this was perfunctory too, no more than a transfer of weight to her left leg.

On the bed at night there was a lot of movement from her left leg and toes, all of it instinctive rather than controlled but things are definitely waking up. Some of the movements were in response to input, so Jo moved her foot up and back to help me pull her sock off. Once again a movement she professed not to be aware of.

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Different strokes...

It has been nearly seven years since Jo suffered a "controlled" stroke whilst undergoing brain surgery to clip the blood vessel that had caused a subarachnoid haemorrhage in 2000. Sadly two successive coilings did not occlude the bleed and so Jo had a craniotomy in August 2008. During surgery the surgeon discovered the coiling had penetrated the rear of the aneurysm, occasioning emergency repair procedures. Consequentially they spent one and a half hours longer in surgery than expected, leading to the right half of Jo's brain forgetting it has to look after the left side of her world.