Day 20: Back to it

Tuesday morning brought the good news that Charlie had slept well and was feeling good. One more X-ray brought the news that he was no longer showing excess stool. Time to get this show back on the road.

Part of the day was visiting a birthday party up on the 16th floor. The 16th floor is the Fun Zone and Charlie got a turn on the car racing game.


If, like me, you ever get a bit snippy at the idea of children's hospitals looking for charity donations when, in fact, those same hospitals generate millions in revenue every day, it's good to know that most of the donations go to helping the kids that are in the hospital as in-patients have less of a crappy time by, for example, buying a giant Mario Kart arcade machine. Like when he saw the menu, Henry is jealous that Charlie gets to go to the 16th floor.

With Henry still away, I took the opportunity to go in to the hospital again. Charlie was looking great and was ready to resume his flag game.

Over the weekend, Charlie had started asking me about flags. Talking to him I learned that he had watched a YouTube video where you had to guess the country by its flag. He'd liked the game so, on Monday, when I went to see him I loaded a similar game on my iPad to play with him. He was really good at it. "Easy! Brazil!... Too easy!! That's Denmark". When one of the nurses came to help him, he noticed what Charlie was doing and asked him about the flag of The Philippines where his family is. Charlie swiped to show the nurse that he had already scored that one;


Tuesday, his nurse's name was Kenya. Charlie didn't know the flag of Kenya but he does now. It's a good one.


His schedule on Tuesday included a PT session at 5pm. As he headed off, he was grilling his physical therapist about which flags he knew. When he returned a little longer than one hour later, it was because he'd been taken to the library on the 16th floor where he had checked out a Flag Encyclopedia and he was thrilled.  Nerd.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 18: Sunday / Fathers' Day

Image
Did you know that Fathers' Day is 50 years old in America? The first Fathers' Day was 1972, I read. I got to spend the morning with Charlie, the afternoon with them both and then the latter part of the day with Henry. So, given the circumstances, that is the best I could ask for. It was a day that had a lot of changes in it, not just where I was and who I was with. Like a lot of people, Aly and I stay in touch via Instant Message throughout the day when we are not together. I'll share our Sunday morning chat because it's relevant to how the day progressed. Charlie has a history of intestinal issues that go all the way back to the first few days of his life. All that is explained in the blog about their time in the NICU. However, the relevant part here is that Aly and I discuss Charlie's pooping quite a lot. Sorry. He has a routine and routinely takes medicine to make sure that he routinely goes. Here's another relevant IM from Sunday; Things got better for Charl...
Read more

Introduction

On June 2 of 2022, Charlie had a Selective Dorsal Rhizotomy. Since there are a bunch of articles about what that is, I am not going to spend time trying to paraphrase them for this. I will just say that it is a surgery on the spine performed with the intention that it will improve communication between his brain, spine and muscles by going into his spine and cutting sensory nerve fibers.  The recovery is in-patient rehabilitation for several weeks. Back when Charlie and Henry were born, we did a blog to keep people updated and it helped give me (David, Charlie's dad) something to occupy my mind and has since been a helpful source of memories of that time. So, I decided to write a blog about this experience. The hospital is Texas Children's Hospital in the Medical Center in Houston, Texas. For those that know that hospital: Surgery was in Legacy Tower then we moved over to West Tower.
Read more

Day 37: Friday Energy

Image
The post's title is actually about a distinct lack of energy. Charlie was a bit grumpy and tired this morning. I wasn't much better and had one of those days when everything felt like it needed more effort on my part than normal.  Aly very kindly took a drive into the city to drop off some clean clothes for Charlie and a care package that was mostly for me.  Charlie had his therapy sessions and continued to do well. Following a request from me for some tips about to help him with something, I had 10 minutes with him and his occupational therapist. I was very struck by how very well she knows Charlie already. When I processed that thought I was reminded that I am literally writing a post with title Day 37. Yeah, you get to know someone after 5 weeks.  I have also noticed over the last few days how very popular Charlie is around here. I acknowledge my own bias but, for example, when I said that I thought Charlie was not in a great mood, the answer was an emphatic - "no way,...
Read more