From the living room

Today I am spending my evening as I have most evenings since my last post : sitting in the visitor's waiting room aka the living room hooked up to the circulation booster and watching TV on the big screen. It is more comfortable and friendly than my room due to the totally unnecessary wall in the middle of the room and much more comfortable for my scribe. Ky Ron and Cali visited the weekend before last when Val was here. We took my power chair on its longtime drive yet - to the Norman of course for lunch! It was lovely to see everyone I can't believe how tall Cali has grown. I need to write a blog more often as the days tend to run together. I had a visit last week from Ange, who brought a supply of her sisters famous brownies. They are so good we could use them as currency in here like they use cigarettes in jail. Sam also stopped by as did Sonia and Anton with their wedding footage from Lombok. It was lovely to watch including the bonus footage of the bucks night :-) Sam and Jane also visited from SA bringing more chocolate gifts, their son Dylan made friends with some of the other children and was fas asleep by the time I emerged from Physio. Wednesday afternoon we held the second scrabble tournament. I won the last game by one point which gave me the tournament and moved my ranking from 13 to 12 in Queensland! I am I charge of approaching the Norman to see if we can hold the next tournament there, I am sure they will be delighted. The problems in getting to appointments on time continue but I believe they are finally solved. I had Darrel all to myself over the weekend we spent part of Saturday with Shaun and Ron at Southbank. The crowds for Bastille day were harder to navigate through than I expected but I managed to stop myself from charging through at high speed. I now how it feels to be short. On Sunday Darrel BBQd the largest prawns I have ever seen eight were more than enough for the two of us. After Darel left to catch his plane I convinced one of the nurses to set my Kindle up for me on text to voice with zero volume. I read for four hours straight and finally finished my first book since the accident. We have had some breakthroughs today and last week. The first being a flicker of movement in my right thumb and the second movement in the toes of my left foot. I am ecstatic about both of these developments. In OT we have been practicing typing on the notepad computer, my record for "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is 2 mins 7 seconds not bad for one finger typing. Since my last blog I developed a pressure spot on my right heel which meant no compression stockings and also marks from the binder (large and uncomfortable elastic belt) which meant no binder. I also declined to give blood for routine blood testing. I am delighted to report that the doctors have reluctantly agreed that discontinuing the stockings, binder and routine blood tests is unlikely to have an adverse effect. Yay! No to get them to agree to discontinue the panadol and movicol....