What a wonderful day we've had! Bill will hate me for putting this out here, but I know all of you will be just as thrilled as we were...he indicated that he needed a bedpan! The PCT was cleaning him up afterwards when Dr. Patel came in and when I told him what he had done, he almost cried. He kept telling me that I didn't know how excited he was! It couldn't have been much more than me!

Bill continued to do "new" things during the day. He had to have a chest xray and after the technician sat him up to put the slide behind him, he sat there with no support and held his head straight up until the tech laid him back on the slide. He also took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes! I gave him my Diet Coke bottle and he raised it to his mouth. Of course it was closed.

All of this was done with his right hand. When he tried using his left hand on the bottle, he had to use both hands and he couldn't get it to his mouth. But, late this evening, his pulse ox probe was moved to his right hand and before we knew it, his left hand was rubbing his nose! I noticed that he wasn't using the right hand as much then so I asked him if he would like the probe on his forehead and he said yes so they were going to change it out tonight. That may have been a big part of the problem with movement!

He also bent and straightened his knees in bed and flexed his feet. He hadn't done much movement at all with his legs until now.

Dr. Patel doesn't know all of this unless he checks with the nurse tonight. He did say this morning that he thinks he's going to be ok. He is wanting to work more on speech pathology and getting the trach capped. He's also talking about puttting a feeding tube into his stomach while we're working on the trach so that it can come out of his nose. He is doing more swallowing and starting to mouth words a little and he's doing a lot of coughing now. Hopefully when they occlude the trach the next time he will be able to do more than cough.

If any of you have been keeping an eye on our weather, yes, we have a tropical storm warning until Tuesday morning. Depending on what the latest is on it tomorrow, my plan now is to stay at the hospital tomorrow night. We aren't supposed to get a lot of wind inland but we are supposed to get lots of rain. And, from the rainstorm we got the other night that I got caught in, my route home floods.

This has been a long update, but we had an eventful day and did lots of good things!