This may be a short post. There is not a whole lot I can report as progress, though the therapists tell me that they can see improvement at each session. I live in this fragile body, though, and can’t see it as it happens. It’s sort of like watching the face of a clock. You may be able to perceive some motion of the minute hand, but probably not the hour hand. But if you walk away for an hour and come back you will see that the hour hand has indeed moved. Such it is with improvement in dexterity of the left hand. I do believe that all of the exercises putting pegs in holes, clothes pin placement on horizontal bars, and placement of ever increasingly smaller rings over increasingly narrower and taller posts is having a positive effect. In fact, for the first time since the stroke I am typing this using my left hand and fingers for the keys I would normally do so, on the left half of the keyboard. It was Laura’s idea to start typing with my left hand, and though I balked at it initially, after thinking about it for a few minutes I realized it was a great idea. All of my previous updates were typed with my right hand only. It is a cumbersome and painful process, but it’s important to do as much as I can with the left hand in order to reclaim what was lost.
It’s the same thing with walking. As I have previously reported, I am walking with a hemi-walker, but the steps are short and slow. But I have to walk. I have to retrain the brain to move my left leg properly for walking. Prior to the stroke we purchased tickets to a Cardinals – Red Sox game at Busch Stadium for May 19. Great seats, section 149, four rows up from the bottom of the section, almost directly behind home plate. I will be walking to the seats. There are some stairs involved so we have worked on how to negotiate stairs. In fact, there are two steps down from our kitchen to the garage and I have learned to navigate them quite well.
So, that’s about all for today. Progress continues, albeit slowly.