this WiR

Hey all! A delicious week in review. Be excited.

To start, I'm still on hold or whatever for OT, courtesy of red tape, so nothing official to report on that front. I've been doing wrist/hand e-stim, playing with my tennis balls and baseball, and rocking all sorts of air guitar (like right now), though, so I'm not slacking off too much. Further, methinks the new phone counts as pretty intense dexterity practice...

Phys therapy has been busy! Let's see...

Friday's session was serendipitously cool, not even counting the slightly secret part. I went over an hour early to get in some leg zap bike time, as usual, but, also as is common, all of the bikes were occupied. So there I was, an hour early (me? early? I know) with nothing to do. Hmmm. Well, (1) I'm always up for some manual chair practice, (2) the chair I've been tooling around in was set up and begging for some action, and (3) doing laps on the track is benign enough of an activity that dad could monitor me sans therapist, so I asked my substitute trainer for the day (the 'cenzo) if I could go for it. But (4) he was done with lunch, and (5) was also bored, so he suggested we get started early and go for a trip! Rock, I said, so we went out to push around the medical center campus, testing out my control of the power-assist wheels on inclines/declines and bumpy sidewalks and such. It was fantastic. I can go pretty much anywhere, up and down and all around, with those wheels. Heart. Get me out of this lazy power chair.

After cruising around like that for about 2h, we returned to do the Giger, followed by the now-open leg e-stim bike. Grand. It should be noted that, despite all the ups and downs and how far we went in the power-assisted manual, my arms were neither sore nor tired. It's still a ton of work, but not quite as gruesome and futile as trying to do the same trip with the completely manual chair. Hrrrg!

Okay, that was Friday's crazy four-hour session. Mon/Tues/Wed's times were a bit more standard - Giger, then either weights or manupropel, then fighting with the broken upper-extremity e-stim bike. Wednesday we completely avoided the uppers bike in favor of the arm cycle part of the MOTOmed. The MOTOmed machine is yet another arm and/or leg ergometer that does not include FES assistance. Instead, I pedal as usual, as much on my own as possible; then it either provides resistance or passive motor assistance, depending on [details omitted] my speed relative to a preset speed goal [mostly]. In other words, first I set a speed, something like 40rpm or so. Then I pedal (I was doing it with my arms). If I went much faster than 40, it increased resistance to make it more difficult and slow me down. If I dropped a lot lower than 40, it would either decrease resistance or move the pedals for me, letting me have a short break without stopping the movement. If I were doing my legs, then, since I can't pedal, it would do all the work for me, passively running my legs through the motions. This isn't as great as the active exercise provided by coordinated electrical stimulation, but it's still important, as repetitive motion is key to retraining my body how to do stuff. Anyway, this machine was holy cow hard, but I could tell that my triceps were working with a fair amount of strength. That's a, umm, huge discovery.

Today? Mammoth sleep session. I'd be better off if I were smart enough to go to bed 3h earlier on nights before therapy. Diurnalism 101: Fail.

I suppose that's about all for now. I haven't even mentioned that Dr. Lima was here over the weekend - that deserves its own post. Coming soon. Word out, skillets de la maison.