48 Hours After Surgery

We'll it may not look like she's making progress, but she is. Every two or three hours the roll her into a different position which allows her nerves and muscles to adjust to their new (and correct) positions. But, as you can imagine, these are very incremental moves and come with a great deal of pain. The picture above was taken last night before I left to go home. You can see that the bed is at a reasonable angle compared to the picture below. That's what I mean by incremental... we're talking inches translating into miles of progress.

So today she will get into an almost complete sitting position three times. At least that's the goal. This will put some weight and pressure on the spine and all attached nerves and muscles, so the pain will not be fun. Chalupa also practices her breathing into a tube that measures and improves the strength of her lungs.

We also hope she can start chewing on ice. She's not had anything to eat since Wednesday night (before surgery). Her digestive system in not fully "on line" so they have to ease her into liquids and foods to prevent aspiration. Plus, (I would think) a bowel movement would be pass-out painful at this point. We hope today she can graduate from rinsing her mouth with water to actually consuming it! We'll see.

Still very groggy and dosing in and out of consciousness. Her voice is weak primarily because she still can't take huge breaths of air. The Intellectual Giant (IG) stopped by to say hello. He brought some great trashy reaching material (People, Enquirer etc...). She will be a much more engaging person by later Sunday afternoon.