Day 41: Welcome Home Charlie

He made it!

Day 41 was his last day in the hospital. The first thing Charlie said in the morning was "am I going home today?"

We had breakfast and packed. The doctors came round and then put in the discharge order. 

Charlie took a walk to the gym to say goodbye to people. Then, at around 10am Aly announced she had arrived and I started running things down to the car. 

Aly had decorated the car and Charlie was thrilled to see it. He also got a round of applause from the traffic management team, which he acknowledged regally. 

The front of the house was decorated too! 

He made a cooking video in the kitchen and got to play with Henry. As did I, which I had been missing.

And that's it. That's the story. Except it's not.

Charlie has out-patient physical therapy 3 times a week and he still has some way to go getting his strength up. 

But the surgery did what it was supposed to do. To truly measure the success will always be a bit difficult for me because so much of it was to halt the deterioration. That deterioration was happening because his body's growth was outpacing his leg strength. This time next year when we assess his ability to get around we won't know how bad it would have been if he hadn't had the surgery. 

On a lighter note, his time in the hospital gave him the spare time to learn the flags of the world. I had a hunch that Henry might get a kick out of this so pulled up this page from the quiz we did. With Henry looking over his shoulder, Charlie began. "Syria, Oman, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka...". As I expected, Henry's mind was blown. "What the??? Are these even countries??" 

"Uzbekistan, Lebanon, Yemen..."

"What is happening?? Is Charlie a genius now?"

I think this will be the last post on this blog. If something important and relevant happens, I might come back to it but, assuming that won't happen, thanks for reading!