(Originally posted March 9, 2009)

My car is getting an oil change and some recall work done (something having to do with the air conditioner, so nothing real critical) so I'm trying to multitask. That's like the story of my life these days.

I promised an update about the optometrist's appointment. J.J.'s vision has changed very slightly since the stroke, so that his current glasses correct him to 20/25 rather than 20/20. However, his peripheral vision doesn't appear to be impacted at all. They suggested that J.J. see his opthamologist in Columbus because he's developed a really large, dense cataract in his right eye (remember, he doesn't have vision in this eye anyway) that should be addressed, since if it ruptures it could cause an autoimmune response that could be dangerous. They will fax the report to Dr. Acula, then we should be able to get a referral to the rehabilitative driving portion of RHI. I just want to make sure J.J. will be safe behind the wheel. He'll have to retake the driving test before he drives again, and RHI will take care of getting everything set up for this to take place. I know being able to drive again will go a long way toward making J.J. feel more independent.

This afternoon J.J. had both speech and physical therapy. Speech was first; this is only the second appointment J.J. has had as an outpatient. He did much better in several areas than he did last time, particularly in spelling, following multi-step directions, sentence completions and sequencing. It was very encouraging and I attribute a lot of the improvement to getting rid of that medication. He has homework to complete before Thursday's therapy session (working on his handwriting, mostly). We're also supposed to keep playing games and doing crosswords and word finds as much as possible.

Physical therapy was interesting. J.J. is working on higher-level balance functions, such as walking a line by putting the heel of one foot in front of the toes on his other foot (like a tightrope walker), walking sideways by crossing one leg in front and then the other behind (which kind of looks like he's line dancing!), standing on an unstable surface with his eyes closed while the therapist pushes on him and tries to get him to break balance (this one made me extremely nervous!!!) and tapping his toes on a wooden box in front of him. He did wonderfully. The only exercise that didn't go well was the one where he was asked to stand on one foot for 15 seconds. He can do about 8 seconds on the right and about 6 seconds on the left. We'll keep working on this. He has physical therapy again on Thursday.

J.J. is having some pain in his legs that we think is just adjustment to the changes in his gait, but it started bothering him a lot last night. We're keeping an eye on it per the doctor's instructions and have another appointment on Wednesday morning to monitor this.

Tomorrow is J.J.'s day off--no doctor appointments or therapy visits, yay!--but it's a busy day for me at work and Eli has both a drum lesson and a 4H meeting tomorrow evening, so it won't feel particularly low-key. Hopefully J.J. will have dinner waiting on us when we get home since he will have had the house all to himself all day!