Awaiting results – and more testing

Taylor has been taking it easy these past few weeks, as he battles fever, fatigue, and a little confusion.  He remains in great spirits, but is relieved when he has a day without doctor visits or diagnostics, so he can just hang with his dogs listening to audiobooks, or work on speech.

He has been requesting a lot of speech work lately, which is taking a little more effort for some of the sounds since he got his braces a few weeks back.

Speech Therapy through his cranio-facial reconstruction team has been discontinued, as he met all goals and has essentially graduated from that therapy set.  He has been referred the Barrow Neuro outpatient crew for ST where they will work primarily on swallow/eating for the brain-injured, now that his mouth has been partially reconstructed to where he could begin to do so.

Typically, his weeks have one or two PT and OT visits, where he works for one hour one-on-one with amazing therapists at St. Joseph’s Hospital – Barrow Neuro Rehab (outpatient).

He has “Recreation Therapy” at SPOFIT – Disability Empowerment Center http://www.spofit.org/about-spofit/ a few times a week where he has a range of activities from swimming/hydro work to rock climbing, to orienting and navagating (mobility training for the vision impaired).   He also has a personal trainer for weight-lifting.

He begins “tethered-running” with a volunteer from http://www.achillesinternational.org/ in the next few weeks.  He hasn’t been running or jogging since the accident, but wants to add it to his regime, and these folks are trained to work with vision impaired folks/disabled.  Awesome organization.

He is set to take a few classes through the AZ Center for the Blind and Visual Impaired on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which includes iPad/iPhone assistive technology, intermediate computers and a sign language class.

Pretty much all of it is on hold for now, as physicians analyze data and decide how to get Taylor feeling better – and find the infection as root cause of fevers, fatigue and confusion.

A head CT will be today or tomorrow, and an Indium-111 scan is scheduled later this week.

Indium-111 scanning is a process where they take a blood sample from Taylor, pull out the white blood cells, stain them with Indium-111 (a radioactive tracer), and inject the stained white blood cells back into his body.  24 hours later, he visits the radiology department where they scan his body and see where the white blood cells migrated to see possible sources of infection.

In the meantime, he is laying low and kicking back.  He is anxious to get this all figured out, so he can choreograph his schedule to what is fun, rehabilitating, and manageable.  All of which is worked around the non-negotiable 2-3 hour nap per day.  Gotta recharge those batteries!