Hello, dear friends and family—Alyx here with an update. Where yesterday was a day of encouraging progress, today has been a harder day and a reminder of the things I've been telling myself from the beginning to try to stay as grounded in reality as possible—brains are weird, healing isn't linear, and we won't know how this is going to turn out until we know. Today, we still don't know.
Mom seemed quite lucid when we arrived this morning. She had already been taken back for a CT scan and was back to sitting up strapped into the chair when we got to her room. We talked to her, and she really seemed to be tracking what we were saying, making sustained eye contact and nodding at appropriate points. She was also moving her mouth a lot more, clearly trying to form words. Some things we think we were able to figure out—she seemed to want to know how long she had been in the hospital, for one thing. Her face in general seemed more expressive, with continued smiles turning up the left corner of her mouth, raised eyebrows, and the occasional eye roll when she couldn't get something across to us or the hospital staff.
However, after what felt like a really strong start to the morning, she spent most of the late morning into this evening appearing quite fatigued, and was much less responsive. Physical therapy came by to try to get her limbs moving more and do an assessment of where she's at currently as well as starting to get a picture of what our goals for her recovery might be, and she seemed to struggle to move even her left side on her own, which she'd been doing much more freely earlier in the day. Speech therapy also came by and tried to fit her trach with a speaking valve, but determined she wasn't quite ready for that yet—they will be back tomorrow to try again. The speech therapist was particularly kind—I was alone with Mom when he came to fit the valve, and he clearly and patiently explained the structure and process to me so that I would know what to expect. He also made sure to bring us some visual communication tools to try to use with Mom in her more lucid moments.
We also got a couple of pieces of hard news today: first, that her CT scan results, though still showing no new bleeding in her brain, didn't show the amount of progress we've been hoping for in terms of the swelling in the brain reducing, meaning it will likely be at least another week before they consider replacing her bone flap. And second, we learned that the person behind the wheel of the pickup truck that hit Mom and Dad was a 21-year-old distracted driver with no assets or bodily injury liability insurance, so Mom and Dad will not be receiving funds from any outside source aside from any crowdfunding we do on our own. (A quick note on that: We are working on getting the GoFundMe set up—we know some of you were concerned about them potentially taking a portion of the donations, but we have confirmed that they only take credit card processing fees, which is true of any platform serving the same purpose—and are planning to launch that in the next couple of days.)
In the meantime, we have reached out to the long-term acute care hospital on the premises to get pre-authorization rolling for her transfer over there, where she would have access to a much greater quantity of daily rehabilitation services, which I think is really what she needs most at this point. She would be able to go to that facility before the bone flap is replaced, so we wanted to be sure to start that process as soon as possible. As of the time that I'm writing this on Monday evening, she's still in the ICU—the plan is still to move her to the hospital's step-down unit since she's pretty stable at this point, but a bed has not opened up over there yet.
We so appreciate your continued thoughts, prayers, support, and care for Mom, and I'm sorry that I don't have more distinctly positive news for this particular update. Although I've been a bit of a wreck at various points today, I am doing my best to trust that Mom's brain is working overtime to form new neural pathways for what she lost in the accident, and that hopefully that hard work (and all the poking and prodding she's getting in the ICU) is a large part of why she's so tired. I know she's in there, and it's clear to me even when she seems less lucid that she knows people are caring for her, despite the context probably being confusing. Ultimately, we can't know what's going to happen tonight, or tomorrow, or even a year from now. What we can do is give her all the love we've got.