Quick Update

Mark will likely be discharged on Friday. He’s making progress in many ways. He’s compliantly working with PT, OT and speech six days a week. He’s still refusing his heparin shot and bloodwork, so his need to stand his ground in order to feel he has some control over his life is intact. At least he’s accepting his other medications. His mood has leveled out quite a bit, thankfully. In some ways, the parts of this post-treatment phase that are about frontal lobe injury are familiar to me. I’ve navigated from where he is now up to a better baseline before. So while I did burst into tears when the case worker told me they were preparing him for discharge, I do know that I can adjust to having this version of Mark home again. In this case, being familiar with it is not necessarily a positive. The tears were because I know, from experience, that it will be a lot. For me and for the boys. The tears were also because Mark cannot walk unassisted, period. The reason for this is surgical. There’s two muscles, I have learned, that connect your quads to your knee. One of those is where it belongs. The other is now living in Mark’s forehead. His knee now buckles when he walks, and it does so unpredictably. Will his other muscles figure out how to compensate? I have no idea. So for Mark to get up every morning, for him to get to the couch, for him to get to the dining room table for meals, for him to get to the bathroom, will require a person holding onto him. This is a new level of … well, I don’t know the right words for it. I’m too tired to come up with them. You can fill in the blank. Bad? Hard? Absurdly bad? Absurdly hard? Mark is coming home. I feel like I should be preparing. And I am, to the best of my ability. In between bouts of lying in bed and staring out the window, trying to figure it all out.

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