I am posting the journal entries from my sister’s CaringBridge site (http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/tracyslatoncrosson) in order to retain that documentation in our 2014 blog book. Check out the start of the series on my blog with the “My Sister” post.
Hard to Believe
By Ken Crosson — Mar 10, 2014 9:53pm
This entire experience has been so hard to believe that I should be incapable of being astonished by now. Well, astonished I am anyway: Just two weeks after a lot of us were thinking she might not even survive, Tracy is home, having been discharged from rehab this morning.
Tracy's mother, our friend Kim, and I went to the hospital today to see Tracy's rehab routine so we could help out once she got home, but there seems not to be much to do. First her physical therapist put her through some tests, which she passed flawlessly. That therapist recommended discharge with no limitations, and said she didn't even see the point of outpatient physical rehab. Next came the occupational therapist, who said the same thing -- it's time for Tracy to go home, and there's no need for follow-up occupational therapy. The speech therapist said essentially the same thing, recommending some exercises and games to address Tracy's few, minor, lingering cognitive deficits, but questioning whether Tracy needed any formal speech/cognitive therapy as an outpatient. In the end they set up an evaluation for us with an outpatient speech therapist tomorrow, but I doubt there will be any formal therapy after that.
Tracy gets tired more easily than she did before this all happened, and she will wear a defibrillator vest for a few months to keep tabs on her heart rhythms until any real danger of recurrence is past. She still is hazy on some older memories, and simple math problems make her think harder than they used to. For the time being she has to take a few pills every morning and one before bed, and we've switched her coffee to decaf. It will be a little while before she's left alone to care for kids, and probably a bit longer before she drives a car. There are a couple of scrapes and bruises and some small scars, but anybody who sees and talks to Tracy now and didn't see her back when this all started would be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss has been about.
She's fine. Not 100%, maybe, but fine. And she'll get to 100% in a few months. We'll be taking the safety bars we got for the bathtub back to Home Depot unopened, because she doesn't need them. Setting up a bedroom on the main level to keep Tracy from having to walk up stairs looks like a waste of effort, because stairs aren't a problem for her. We're taking the homeschooling of our two homeschooled boys off her plate one school quarter earlier than planned - they will be starting public school this week, but we had already been planning to send them to school in the fall. And I will work from home more often so I can be around to help out, but that's something that probably should have happened anyway.
Tracy's home and life, amazingly, goes on. I hardly believe it and I don't pretend to understand it. I'll just accept it, gratefully.
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