Today is day 50. Last week David was moved out of the Subacute ward into skilled nursing. His trach is out permanently and the site is almost completely healed. It took him a couple days to get over the confusion of the move. Thankfully he's got a great roommate and the roommates wife is pretty awesome as well. 

I think David is the most favorite patient in here right now, all the staff love him. The biggest hold up for getting home right now is his strength.  While he's lost 80 lbs he still has a lot of weight to hold up. Soooooooo his therapists are working to build strength in both his legs and his arms/chest. He CAN walk a short distance with the walker (10 feet or so) but after that the chance of him falling is much, much, greater.  Plus lifting himself up off the bed or from his wheelchair is pretty tough so they are working on building his strength. 

Today in PT he was able to walk up stairs but his legs almost gave out on him twice. BUT he was able to walk up and down a set of 5 stairs assisted along with all of his leg excercises.  YAY!!

He is finally eating "mostly" solid food and regular liquids. The speech pathologist did a toast trial this morning which he finally passed. He told me that the key to NOT choking on toast was to slow down and chew throughly not to behave like a ravenous wolf and to not walk while eating. Very safe advice, LOL.

David's memory IS getting better but he's going to have big gaps for a while still. I will probably say that a lot. He is now aware that he has memory gaps and that is starting to irritate him. We had a good laugh talking about how I used to nag at him to write things down or make a list and he would tap his head and say it was all up here. Today he said well crap, up here is just a basket full of garbage.  He told me he was considered to be a flight risk and apparently he is, because he gets lost rolling around the building in his wheelchair. 

We played Scrabble this week. I'm very sad to report he can still kick some Scrabble ass!!  Seriously. He was challenging his staff and I told them to not play for money. Next week I'm going to bring some other games with me.