Mary works this week with her physiotherapists
No real surprise: There has been no miracle for
Mary with the hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy. But there has been a slow and creeping improvement in muscle tone, awareness
and, most specifically, with Mary’s eyesight. As of today, she has undergone 30 ninety-minute sessions and has 10 treatments left in this cycle.
We can’t, and won’t, rely on our judgment –
so anxious are we to find any kind of improvement – but we’ve quizzed the
people who work with her every day, her caregivers and the private physiotherapists
who come in to treat her. Each and every one of them has conceded there are
subtle differences in her eyesight and co-ordination. And we trust them.
They’ve known Mary a long time.
Her short-term memory is still shaky and probably always will be. (Not
unless a miracle happens.) But we keep going with the therapies in an attempt
to improve her quality of life. The hyperbaric chamber oxygen was a long shot.
We just had to give it a try. Even small changes make a big difference to
someone with a severe brain injury.
The two physios who work with her weekly
find she can now more easily slide up and down the gym wall, from a sitting to
standing position and back again. Her stationary bike cycling has improved and to
date her longest trip has been three kilometres.
We
use a variety of tools to help her memory. Mary spends a lot of her day in her
wheelchair. She watches TV, listens to music, and with the aid of her
caregivers, plays cognitive games on her large touch-screen computer. She sits
facing two huge whiteboards: The left one contains comments on the previous
day, who visited her, where she went, what she did. The right one contains the
date, month, weather, who her caregiver is that day, her washroom schedule,
where she’s going, what she will be doing that particular day.
Everyone has noticed she now seems better
able to read the two boards. She sits
with her head up more, listening intently and reaching for her communication sheet,
instead of fading out.
It all sounds so small, so simple. But training
a severely injured brain to do even these simple things is monumental. And we’ll
take even slightest, smallest change. It gives us something to build on.
While there has been a lot of research done
on TBI – traumatic brain injury – not a lot has been undertaken on ABI - anoxic
brain injury. We’re kind of groping in the dark. We have no role model to
follow. There are no guideposts at the side of the road. We’ve been hanging out
at various health care facilities and clinics for five and half years now and
while we’ve met dozens of people with traumatic brain injury, we’ve yet to meet
another person with severe anoxic brain injury. We don’t really know what
improvement looks like. We have no idea how, or even if, Mary can improve.
Pick up any book on brain injury and
you’ll find few pages on anoxic brain injury cases. We believe this is because
many people don’t survive these injures, are taken off life support long before
anyone can tell what the outcome might have been.
So, where do we go from here? We keep
going, believing – perhaps foolishly, only time will tell – that we’ll bump
into something at some point that will help her. But as long as she continues
to improve, even slightly, the game isn’t over.
