A Brief Update

Figured I’d make some time to post an update.

The HealthSouth outpatient therapy my folks arranged at the start of the month continues to go well, and it seems like it’s helping Chris.  It’s three times a week, with an hour of each discipline:  physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech.  Chris rides down in the nursing home wheelchair van (or soon, Capital Metro Metro Access when the nursing home vehicle isn’t available).  They are doing some pretty neat neuromuscular electrical stimulation on Chris’s legs, arms and hands to cause movement using his own muscles.  There’s also an auto ambulator “walking machine” on a different floor that we might get to use one day.

It’s hard to describe, but at night, there are a lot more flashes of “Chris” lately…  where you look into his good eye and see your brother, just like you remember him before the accident.  I brought his laptop to the nursing home one evening last week – the same laptop he was using at Starbucks on the night of the accident.  I loaded up some sample C# source code in Visual Studio 2010, and boy, was he interested!!!  (VS2010 is the development environment he sat in front of every day at work)

He’s going off into these trance-like states more and more, where his left eye slowly drifts upward and to the right.  The only way to snap him out of it is to tap him lightly on the forehead.  Definitely going to ask the neurologist when we visit him why this is happening more and more – hopefully the answer will be more insightful than the standard response, “must be due to brain injury”.

As my dad previously mentioned in his blog post at the beginning of the month, Corrie MacLaggan, with the Austin American-Statesman, did a good story on Chris that ran January 2nd:
http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/state-budget-cuts-keep-brain-injured-texan-out-1157689.html

Charles Gonzalez, with KSAT-TV in San Antonio, did another story with a similar focus:
http://www.ksat.com/health/26615066/detail.html (Video)

In a nutshell:  Texas is one of a few states in the country that provides funding for intensive, inpatient therapy at a proper rehabilitation hospital (after your private health insurance company bails out on you, because you’re suffering from an extended duration catastrophic illness).  Due to statewide budget cuts, the department that runs the Comprehensive Rehabilitation Services program for brain and spinal cord injury had to put the thing on hold.

It’s a shame, because what happened to Chris could happen to anyone – it just ambushes entire families.  Chris was the only person involved in a motorcycle accident at Texas NeuroRehab.  The other patients, of all ages:  multi-vehicle car accidents, single car rollovers, strokes, aneurisms, or even one who was nearly beaten to death by some thugs (and survived with a serious and life-changing brain injury).