Well, we don’t know what the next step is going to be yet. I hope it is TIRR in Houston, but I’m not sure how soon that will happen. In any case, we need to be moved out of the apartment in San Antonio at the end of the month, so something will certainly happen this week (“Plan Z”, perhaps?).
My mom practicing head turns on command with Chris. Dad is off to the right, cheering Chris on.
RIOSA terminated Chris’s outpatient OT/speech therapy at the beginning of September, so we’ve kind of been idling at the apartment since then. My folks have continued some of the therapy themselves – practicing head movements every night, practicing eye movements, etc. We also had a really nice Evolv XT standing frame show up from the medical supply company last week. A bit late in the game, but we used it this past weekend with Chris for 30 minutes (my mom kept a very close eye on his blood pressure, of course).
Chris in the standing frame
My folks transitioned Chris over to a regular GP doctor (from the doc at RIOSA). The new guy discontinued some of the medications Chris has been on since the start of this whole thing (blood pressure medications that began at TexasNeuro and anti-cholesterol medications that were probably a mixup between my dad’s medical records at RIOSA ?!?). Chris no longer needs weekly INR level checks for Warfarin / Coumadin, which means no more Monday visits by the home healthcare nurse. Cool.
Chris hadn’t had any imaging of his head in quite some time; after much wrangling with UnitedHealth, his neurologist in San Antonio, Dr. Philip Onghai, was able to have an MRI arranged. The scan shows some loss of mass in several parts of Chris’s brain. Chris’s original neurointensivist from University Hospital, Dr. Augusto Parra, says this is an unfortunate and unavoidable component of traumatic brain injury…
I suppose on the subject of neurologists, Chris was also able to come up to Austin to see Dr. David Morledge for a second round of Botox injections in various muscles (the goal being to ease muscle tone before initiating an intensive PT/OT therapy program). My folks said Morledge was happy to see Chris again (the last time was in February, while we were still at the nursing home).
Two days before the accident: just having a beer with my brother at Flying Saucer in San Antonio. The nightmare looms, we have no idea.
The wheelchair van is great! We’ve managed to take Chris out on some trips to San Antonio’s Flying Saucer pub, along with a short excursion out onto the Leon Creek Greenway. It’s great to get Chris out of the apartment, and even better to go to some familiar places from Chris’s life before all this began.
That’s it for now – I’ll post more when we know for sure where Chris is heading next.
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