First days of Acute Inpatient Rehab at the Mayo Clinic

Day 9: First Day of Rehab

Today (9/12/17) was Daniel’s first day starting therapy in earnest at Mayo.  Lots to learn.  First of all, Daniel has to learn how to sit up.  He has lost feeling and core strength along the abdomen and below.  When you lose sensation, you can’t tell where your body is in space.  Daniel is having to re-train his body to understand based on visual and head position cues how upright he is sitting, while he learns to use his arms to walk forward from a lying to a sitting position.  The amount of upper body and core strength this requires is substantial. 

He’s learning to turn himself while lying in bed.  This entails manually pulling his knee up a bit, and then swinging his arm over to the side bed rail, then pulling himself over.  He still can't put his brace on by himself (probably gonna take a while until he can do that alone, if ever, but he only has to wear it for 3 months...).  

Day 14: Daniel has made incredible progress!  The hypotension (low blood pressure) is much less of an issue.  It's still helpful to wrap his legs to keep the blood in his core, but at least he can sit up in his chair and wheel himself around a bit.  Today he went out to the courtyard on the Mayo Rehab floor and shot a few baskets. I wish I could tell you that his post-injury field goal % was 100%, but it’s a whole new skill set to shoot baskets from a wheelchair…  Here’s what success looks like!