September 17. The right hand. If there is once source of unnerving frustration for Riley, it is the slow progress with his right hand. While there is still much to work to do on many things as the recovery progresses - perfecting his step so there is no limp, increasing his gait from walk to jog and eventually to a run, adding side steps and fast feet ladders (something hockey players know all too well), increasing his memory retention and cognition - getting that right hand to come back to something closer to normal is something Riley wants with a passion. It burns in belly to have that hand move. There has been some awesome progress. Three weeks ago, feeding himself right-handed was a challenging, clumsy exercise in frustration which required a lot of assistance from either someone else or Rileys left hand to even get some food on the fork. Today, Riley is much more adept at getting the food on the fork and into his mouth, requiring only infrequent assistance and subtle reminders to keep his shoulder passive and out of the motion of getting hand to mouth. And there is better control of some muscles in the hand. A few backs I tweeted about Riley taking the garbage out to the end of driveway. While he did it, with a huge amount of determination, it was not a simple thing and holding onto the handle of the rolling garbage can was a non-trivial exercise. Tonight Riley basically told me to bugger off and let him do it himself. Nice work kid. Still, there is much work to do and ground to cover to get that hand to a more normal state. Tonights exercise was working with the can opener. It took some effort but we did get a twist of the wrist. A few of them as a matter of fact. You can see both the satisfaction on his face (and moms) and the determination and concentration it takes to do such a simple thing. A nice, satisfying step forward in re-wiring that brain. #FightRileyFight A nice bonus in this video comes at about the 2/3 to 3/4 mark. You see Riley turn to say something to Mairaed who is filming with the iPad - when he looks at the camera you see a square smile (more of a smirk) on his face and two pretty normal looking eyebrows. Its these small things that his mom and I, and Mimi and Liam look at and know in our hearts that bit by bit, this kid is taking on every battle and winning them one by one. As Lombardi said, Winning isnt everything, its the only thing. I think Riley would have done just fine playing for Green Bay back in that day.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 03:03:25 +0000
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