Day 41 - Tuesday January 24, 2012

Well, Steph is starting to count the days until Bridgett gets released from rehab! We are all pretty excited about it.  This morning Bridgett had her appointment at the dental clinic.  So, she was actually in a dental chair with actual instruments (not lying in an ICU bed with no equipment) and they found that she had another exposed nerve.  So, at this point I think she will need three root canals and four caps.  The dentist was really nice.  Everything went well as he sealed the tooth and added composite to it.  The other teeth that had been sealed looked good.  He gave me the name of a dentist in Ogden that would do the dental work in a surgical center.  We don't want the trauma of having this done in the dentists office.  I don't really think that her rehab doctors would approve of the dentists office either as they are trying to minimize any further trauma that she has to experience.  Bridgett's oxygen levels with the trach capped have been 98-100% so they will hopefully take the trach out tomorrow.  Apparently they only want her to have one thing happen a day.  So, dentist today, trach tomorrow and neck x-ray the next day (we think that is the order).  On a sad note--Bridgett appears to be slowly remembering her accident.  We were hopeful that she would not remember it, for her sake--apparently most people do not.  Over the past few days she has been making random comments to Arrianne, Stephany and me.  She has said things like...that guy should have stopped and not hit me.....I was so scared and thought I was going to die.....I almost died but I was surrounded by "eyebrow" (this seems to be a word she uses when she doesn't remember the right word)....I was so scared and didn't know what was going to happen.  Perhaps for her this is part of remembering who she is...part of her long term memory coming back.  I asked the doctors about my worries that she doesn't yet have a clear idea of who she is and who we are (although she knows I'm "mom" she doesn't always remember my name, etc) and they said she is still getting oriented and everything is OK, that is not abnormal, etc.  They said she will slowly remember things as she is more oriented.  She is still prone to think she is younger than she really is.  However, sometimes her memory is very clear about something she heard earlier in the day, hours before.  The brain really is a complicated and complex thing!  I talked to one of the therapists today about her vision.  I said, will the brain eventually adjust to double vision and they said yes.  If people can tolerate it, it's better not to patch the eye and let the brain adjust.  It will be interesting to see what the doctors at the Moran eye clinic have to say next week.  Bridgett continues to improve in balance, both while sitting and walking.  She's doing awesome.  Today she walked up and down five flights of stairs, while Randy just held onto the back of her "gate belt", the safety belt they put on everyone so that there is a secure place to hold or grab as the case may be!  Randy said it was 80 stairs.  Whew! She is speaking more all the time.  Jessica at speech therapy said that she would consider that she spoke 75% of the time during therapy today.  When Jessica wrote words on the white board for Bridgett to read she could read some of them.  Others that she couldn't read--if Jessica spelled them, Bridgett would say the word.  Again, many things are complicated because of the whole vision issue.  Bridgett did a comprehension test with Rebecca today; I think that's what they called it.  One of the questions was really hard  I thought.  She gave a list of words for Bridgett to repeat and Bridgett did.  Then she asked about five more questions or so and at the end of the test asked Bridgett to rename the list she had previously given her.  I couldn't even remember it!  Then she gave her clues, like the first word was a fabric--was it velvet, satin or cotton.  Bridgett remembered three of the words like this.  Anyway, she did not do that well on anything that involved vision to answer, but did good on audio things like repeat these numbers and then repeat a second set of numbers in reverse order.  Like I said, its a complicated issue.