Jason's Road to Recovery: Sorry for the Silence

My apologies in taking so long to update everyone on the first few days at KKI. Jason is still loving the PT sessions here. He's going 3 hours per day, except for Tuesday when he had to go in a bit earlier to have a bone scan done (people with SCI lose bone mass very quickly in the first year post-injury, so they wanted to make sure his bones would be able to withstand a heavy workout....they are strong enough, but there has been loss, so we're upping his daily calcium). The philosophy here is very similar to that of SCI-FIT: motion breeds motion. You have to stimulate and move your muscles to have any hope of them remembering how to work. They do lots of e-stim (electrical stimulation...basically shocking the muscles), and they will be sending us home with an e-stim machine so that J can continue with this. Jason says that most of the exercises at KKI are similar to SCI-FIT, but are more focused: they do gait training (Jason in a holster/sling type thing, held over a treadmill with PTs helping move his legs), but they do it for an hour here with e-stim, whereas he'd maybe do 20 minutes at SCI-FIT, and not with any stim.

He got up in a pair of KAFOs (leg braces) yesterday. He thinks standing in them is not as hard as people have made it out to be, but trying to walk is challenging. His PT has a goal of him walking 7 steps, unassisted by her, before the end of next week. It's a big challenge, but one J is pretty confident of being able to meet. He also starts aquatherapy tomorrow morning. This will be done separately from his three hours of PT. I'll be tagging along for that, so hopefully I can include some photos of the set-up there.

In the mornings, and sometimes in the afternoon while Jason is at PT, we've been exploring Baltimore with Savannah. We've spent a day looking at the tall ships that came into the harbor as part of Baltimore's "Sailabration" of the start of the war of 1812, and we also went to the Maryland Science Center.