Hi All,

Thanks again for your visits and messages of support.

Mike is much more settled in at Talbot now. The nursing staff are fantastic and we have had a couple of great physio and OT sessions. Pretty sure we are driving them mental with how much we want to jam in to a day but ….. it is supposed to be re-hab after all, and it is Forbesy!

A couple of big wins but one big loss in the last few days.

Look out – he is back on food in a big way! Jane – we might be calling on your cooking skills! After a fairly depressing day with his pressure spot, Mike has been all guns blazing for the last couple of days after his eat-feast. Still needs some fattening up but he looks a bit better in the face.
The pressure area that was of concern seems to have cleared up so back to spending a few sessions a day in the chair which is great.

He fed himself today – using this groovey pocket thing and a bent fork he ate a roast lamb lunch! (sorry Erin for the non-technical explanation!). It was unbelievable ….. let me assure you that if you haven’t seen Mike highly motivated before you need to check out his eating. He was amazing, managed to get quite a few mouthfuls (I have video proof) and didn’t spill a drop. Also, he didn’t smash his teeth, eyes or other body parts with the fork which surprised me. Unfortunately he has to engage the activity muscle by muscle which is quite time consuming and (he assures me) very frustrating, so he has started singing to himself to get them working – a bit tragic for the rest of us but it is working a treat for him.

Anyway, he is not getting nearly as many headspins as he is hoisted up and down during the day which is great and his attitude remains amazing … he is thinking of selling his new diet regime – he needs to wear a thing called an abdo-binder for blood pressure help. He is convinced that this means that he can only eat enough to fill his esophagus. Then he figures it takes so much effort and energy to get a mouthful of food to his mouth that everything is negative calories anyway! Needless to say, once he gets back to bed and gets the binder off we try to fill him up!

A special mention tonight to Jo, who bought Ash a “lovely” Dora chair which is outrageously noisy and incredibly irritating! When she dropped it off on Monday night she laughed and said that Mike would have his own room within 24 hours – well she was right! Mike has moved to bed 8. This is still a shared room but at the moment no-one else is in there. It is lovely as he has a view of outside and gets plenty of natural light and bit of space around the bed. We have been shamelessly bribing the wonderful nursing staff with chocolates!

The only loss for the week is that due to staffing issues the hydrotherapy pool is shut-down. We are not yet sure whether this is short term or longer term but for all of you who know Mike and his love of water this is a huge disappointment. We are going to chase up any options we have in this regard. Hopefully we can at least sit him down near the pool where he can absorb the chlorine and feel a bit more like himself! Be warned, I might be needing everyone reading this site to petition the government to get this re-instated!

Will see how he (and his program) goes but it looks as though we might be trying to set aside some rest time in the middle of the day to make sure he is well rested for his physio sessions.

More OT tomorrow with the lovely Erin. His new computer is on order – a huge thanks to Pete and to the good folks at Dell who have rigged up a machine which doesn’t have heat-sensative keys so Mike can use a pointer. He is hoping that sometime next week he will be able to type you all a message – or at worst use some voice recognition software to speak you a message …. btw I love the voice recognition stuff – I am definitely going to nick his computer!

Keep thinking positive thoughts and sending lots of positive energy.

Mon