the first full day of rehab was a blur,first thing in the morning our schedules were brought in, i had ot at 9, followed by combined ot and pt, then more of both in the afternoon and was told others might come in and add or change things all day, so keep checking the sched - ot consisted of learning out to sit up, get dressed (another difference between rehab and med unit, you got to wear real clothes!!!) it was all really hard and i needed lots of help;but was a start - pt was standing with holding on and trying to put weight on the weak leg - which is really hard with no sensation, like you're trying to stand with no leg - i also had speech that day, she gave me a series of numbers to continue, three times she said i was wrong and i said "no i'm not" and explained why - two were errors in her answer sheet, the third was ambiguous, i explained why her answer was also right - she said i went too fast, too, and couldn't keep up with me, well, i was a math major and did that kind of puzzle in my head all the time when id try and fall asleep - interestingly she never tried that kind of exercise with me again.... the hardest part of the day was having to sit up all the hours they wanted us too - they liked parking the wheelchairs in the hallway, either by the door to your rooms or by the nurses station, as a result the visitors had to run the gaunlet of wheelchairs... another thing i discovered that first day was that the nurses and drs in rehab were even more bathroom obsessed than on the med floor;but at least they stopped using baby talk so much - every shift change they'd run in to check how much and when you had input or output, i swear how much your charges peed must be tied to the pay scale.... that night they resp therapy came down, said since they couldn't do a regular sleep study inpatient, they were going to hook me up to an alarmed pulse/ox overnight to see if i really did have oxygen loss, or as i put it, i got to have an e.t. finger all night... after that night, i'm surprised my roommate didn't beg to go home early just to get out of one more night in the room with me.... every time i dozed off for the slightest time the alarm went off, the extremely loud alarm.... they kept lowering the number for the alarm and finally turned it off and just gave me o2 for the rest of the night, the drs had been trying to get me a sleep test for almost six weeks and kept getting told it was impossibly till after discharge... amazingly the day day after the alarm marathon, they figured out a way... they moved my roommate out of the room, on her last night, too, and brought a ton of sleep study equip in, took up the whole other half of the room - he told me that they'd hook me up to all the monitors and let me sleep a few answers, then, if the results were that i was having breathing problems, they'd try the mask and see if it helped - when they woke me up, they tried the nose mask on me;but since i've always been a mouth breather, it made me gag horribly, so they switched to the full mask - as if being unable to roll over, feel half my body or have wires connected to every part of my body wasn't enough to keep me awake, lets add a mask over my face, velcro headgear caught in my hair and noise sounding like a dragon breathing in my ear, not to mention a man sitting in the corner staring at me sleep, and the lights and noise from the nurses station coming in the door, and with all that they expect you to sleep ??? of course when they're done they say they're not allowed to tell you the results, so wait till their boss comes back from vacation in 2 weeks, lol, so its a good thing they "rushed" the tests.... of course they left me with "goop hair", good thing the nurses upstairs had cut my hair all off or it would've been worse (after a week of nurses in 2 hospitals not realizing that my long hair that had been braided when i stroked needed to be let loose to keep it from matting, it was beyond being brushed out or salvaged so id been given a nurses special haircut....) the next day was an eventful one, so ill stop there - next time: "no somersaults on my shift"