Day 160 - Tuesday May 22, 2012

This morning Bridgett woke up and while she was still in bed said she wanted to get up and play the piano, which she did.  Then she said she wanted to read.  We did some reading and when we quit she wanted to read more, so she did.That's Bridgett!  She normally loves to read.  Today we went to see the neurologist here in Kalispell. When we got in the car Mark said are you ready and Bridgett said I was born ready!  Just what Bridgett would have normally said!  The neurologist was Dr. Bret Lindsay and I really liked him!  He thought that Bridgett is doing great.  He said (and we've heard this before) that the length of the amnesia shows how severe the injury was; this was not a small brain injury.  But he said she is early in the recovery stages and there will be good recovery through 24 months.  I asked him specifically if there was any way to tell if any of the damage was because of the oxygen deprivation and he said that would show up in the MRI.  He will download the imaging we brought with us and take a look.  That's good--we were told that the damage would not be seen on any scans so that was wrong. When Bridgett arrived at the hospital her oxygen saturation was 19% and it was at the hospital that they found the gum blocking her airway.  So, prior to that point she had very low oxygen--maybe for 15 minutes or so.  Anyway, I was wondering if that was causing the problem with the amnesia and he said that he hematoma was in the left temporal lobe (we knew that) and that it was in the area that controls language (we knew that) and memory (we didn't know that).  So, no one has ever mentioned that her memory was affected because of the location of the hematoma.  It seems that someone would have told us about that, especially when we were asking so many questions about what was affected etc.  Anyway, he said that her brain is still healing and as it heals she will be able to access more memory information.  Dr. Lindsay asked Bridgett some questions and she did pretty good on answering him--her name, where she lived, what city we were in now (Kalispell) for her appointment etc.  We talked about her short hair and I asked her why it was short and she said because someone shaved it off.  Why I asked and she said because I was in the hospital in an accident.  What happened I said and she wasn't I on my bike and a guy hit me?  So, she is starting to remember things--not actual memory but memory of what we have told her.  He asked her if she remembered the accident and she said no.  He asked what was the last thing she remembers and she said waking up in Bigfork.  I asked her later if she remembers the flight home and she said there's something in my mind about that but I don't know what.  Anyway, I've said this before, but it's probably good she doesn't remember some stuff during this healing process.  When we got home Bridgett disarmed the security system by herself--by memory.  Yeah!