Friday, October 24th updates

Dan's first 2 days in Rehab sure have been busy.

Mornings start with breakfast group at 7:30am in the activity room. Dan may be the youngest one there and also may be the only transplant patient (for now), and they eat together and enjoy conversation. The rest of the morning is a whirlwind of activity: OT (occupational therapy), PT (physical therapy) in the gym, RT (recreational therapy - yesterday the group played Wheel of Fortune, Dan guessed all the letters even though he couldn't see the board!), and in between he gets visits from the doctors, labs, meds, and ST (speech therapy - they are exercising his throat muscles to help the swallowing, exercising his voice which is still a little raspy probably from various scope procedures, and also cognitive therapy to help the confusion). Lunch is in his room at 12noon, then so far the afternoon is free time except for meds and blood sugar monitoring. Yesterday he had dinner in his room, tonite Dan and I ate dinner together in the cafeteria; the hospital gives a $5.00 gift certificate to use for meals eaten in the cafeteria. Yesterday and today, we spent most of the afternoon outside in the healing garden, walking around the hospital parking lot (actually me walking, pushing Dan in the wheelchair), and in the hospital lobby listening to music, yesterday 2 nurses were there singing and playing on the piano "It is well with my soul", today a retired volunteer was playing showtunes on the piano, Dan particularly enjoyed the medley of songs from Wizard of Oz.

Dan's favorite part of today was a visit from Amy and Swen. They walked with us to the healing garden, with me pushing Dan in his wheelchair next to Amy pushing Swen in his stroller, Dan and Swen held hands and did fist bumps in the hallways. We got to our favorite bench in the garden, under a shade tree opposite the waterfall and Swen sat on Dan's lap for quite a while goofing around with his grampa. It was an emotional time for Dan, and another one of those "kisses from God". My turn to be emotional will be tomorrow when I have to say aloha to the kids, they return to Yuma Saturday morning. We really enjoyed another special visit this evening in the garden, Debbie and Tim came by. Tim is turning 17 on Sunday and what a fine young man he is becoming, his dad would be extremely proud of him and I'm sure he is, as well as the rest of his family.

Weekends will be less activity, Dan has OT at 9:15am and PT at 2:15pm, both for 45 minutes. I'm sure afterwards we'll be back walking around outside, Dan loves being out of the room and it is really nice out now, today it was in the high 80s.

It really is "well with our souls",
Debbie and Dan