Practicing Walking!!!

The past few days have been better. Mary's sleep is getting better. Friday night she actually slept 6 hours straight! When she wakes during the night she is usually just stiff. She gets up and walks a little then she can get back to sleep pretty quickly. If she wakes up in the middle of the night we do give her Tylenol.

Mary had her 5th Physical Therapy appointment on Friday. They didn't add any new excerises but they helped us get her knee straighter and then they tightened the "trauma strut" that is supposed to keep her leg straight but it loosens every once in a while. We pushed her knee straighter and tightened the strut again by ourselves on Friday night.

The big news is during PT Mary practiced walking. They focused on making sure when she steps her right foot is pointed forward. During the years she has gotten in the habbit of pointing it in so she could rest her shorter left foot on it when she stood.

But now that she has practised walking that's all she wants to do! It's so great seeing her "walk" pointing two feet forward and her saying it feels good to walk. She even told me "I never knew it would feel good to walk and I wouldn't want to stop!"

Mary told me yesterday that she does have a lot of dreams about walking. They don't seem to bother her like the first time she dreamed about walking.

Mary is like a little old lady now a days. She constantly has aches: glute, groin, knee and a few days ago she started feeling electrical pulses that are over before she can say it is happening but they aren't comfortable. The pulses are most common in her toes. Mary loves to have the heated bean bag on her sore muscles. We use ice on her knee when it hurts. Yesterday when her knee was hurting she actually said "I never knew you could hurt so bad."

You could tell she is feeling different because when we went to my sisters to swim she sat on the steps for a long time vs. playing around like she did the previous time.

However, she ended on a high note when she practised WALKING all by herself in the pool. See video below:

When we went to my sister's to swim we had TWO cakes to celebrate our confirmed 3 cm. as of June 12 and 4 cm. that we "should" be at as of last week. (not sure why I can't get the pictures facing the right direction.)

Even though we have had 4 ice cream cakes and I have gained the weight back that I lost when Mary was in the hopsital Mary has lost weight and still doesn't have much of an appetite. I made her a couple more skirts and when I re-measured her waist it was smaller than before surgery. Now that she is in the fixator I was able to measure more accurately how wide I need to make the skirts in order to allow for the fixator and I made them shorter so we can make sure we can see if she is walking straight when she walks.

An advanced sewer recommended snap tape for the skirts. You just sew in a strip of snaps. Since I am such a beginner I really struggled learning how to sew it in on the first skirt. The second skirt was much easier- I still wouldn't show an expert my handy work but it is functional.