Kimberly is doing great, relatively speaking. The doctors say that cognitively she is far ahead of her physical condition. She has regained almost total use of her left hand, and her right is about where her left was three months ago, and showing a lot of progress.
She is bright and alert. She prints ledgibly with either hand, has started painting again. She has retained her sense of composition and her talent, but her hand is of course unsteady. With the regained use of her arms and hands, she is developing increased mobility in her wheelchair, and is making slow progress on using a walker. She is still very limited in her speaking, and this may be the most lasting obvious effect of her injuries.
After 11 months of being fed by tube, she has regained enough swallowing function to be able to ear pureed foods and thickened liquids. She has also regained bowel and bladder control, which is huge, because many with these types of injuries are incontinent for life. She has permanent optic nerve damage in her right eye, which causes problems with scanning, and consequently reading problems.
She has gone through a series of seemingly obsessive preoccupations. At first, it was many kinds of geometric games and puzzles, anything involving patterns and colors. Then it was math, and she would sit for hours working problems. Lately it is card games, including solitaire when she can't find a partner or two. Her memory also seems to be slowly but steadily improving.
We are on the verge of bringing her home, probably within two weeks. I am a little apprehensive about this, because I will be the priumary caregiver since I am retired and my wife is still teaching. This is going to be a full time, confining job. However, it will provide us with more opportunity to work with her both physically and mentally.
She is a tough, determined little girl, perhaps the one toughest individual I have ever known. She is full of faith and without self pity. At every step of the way, doctors have told us not to expect anything more. When she was lying near death, they could not give any prognosis of her living. When she was comatose, they could not offer any real hope. When she was lying in a "persistent vegetative state" last September, one doctor told us not to expect anything else, that this was the way she would always be. A couple of months ago, we were told that she would never walk independently without aid. Last Sunday, I pointed out to her that her personal record of 17 unassisted steps on a walker was several weeks old. she promptly walked 19 consecutive steps on a walker without my assistance, and I sat her in her chair, very pleased with the effort. She insisted on getting up again, and went 29 steps.
Today at physical therapy, the therapist told us that her limited ability to raise and rotate her right arm would prevent her from doing such things as brushing her hair with her right hand. She didn't respond to this news at all. When we got back to the nursing home and finished our after dinner routine of brushing her teeth and scrubbing her face, she asked for her hairbrush, took it with her right hand, and promptly started brushing the back of her hair.
