6 Weeks in the Hospital

After six weeks of hospitals, hospice care, rehab centers, another round of hospitals, and more rehab, I finally got discharged to go home.

The last week and a half of therapy was extremely productive. I went from being confined to a wheelchair to using a walker to walking with a cane (well that's a little stretch). It's been an amazing experience to witness the effectiveness of a systematic physical therapy regime and how one can retrain their bodies / minds to learn how to walk again even though I don't have the same strength or sensations I once had in my legs.

I'm still not 100% and probably won't be there for a while. Walking with a cane is reserved for well supervised situations but the hope is that this will one day come easier and one day I will be able to get rid of the cane as well.

This week I also got to try acupuncture which was pretty interesting. Instead of getting 1000+ needles in my back, 12 carefully placed needles were placed in all my limbs and left there for 20 minutes. I'm not sure if it was the needles that felt relaxing or the fact that I was scared sh*tless to move and thus interrupt the needles so I had to keep very still for an extended period of time; either way, though, the process was interesting. My motto is to try anything twice and hopefully the acupuncture will eradicate all the cancer from my body.

As my parting gift to Spaulding I painted a ceiling tile (pictured above) of our family mantra and my beacon of hope. Mom and Dad were very jealous.