Mom is Improving

Improvement is always a relative term, of course. She has been at the new hospital for two days. We had a long talk with the head doctor and he confirmed what they were going to do. The first order of business has been to give mom some cortisone to help dry up some of the excess liquid that surrounds her brain and presses down on it. They started the treatment yesterday. Today she was like a different person. She is still not back to herself but I was delighted to see her moving her whole body in bed rather than just her head when she would move any part of her body at all. She also would turn her head to look directly at me and grabbed hold of my hand a couple of times. She is still not herself mentally but she is talking nonstop again, over and over about how she has to work hard to help the children. In this case, she's not talking about my sister and me, whom she still doesn't recognize, but of the orphan children that she worked with when she was a young lady, before meeting my father and moving to the States. She worked long hours to make money to help the orphans in the orphanage. The name of the orphanage was St. Joseph's (San Giuseppe) and she mentioned the name, so we figured out where her memory was. She used lots of words today, though, that I hadn't heard her use since I've been here, a larger vocabulary than simply repeating the same phrase over and over, which is what she was doing before.

It's day to day. I hope to see even more improvement tomorrow, perhaps even a return of more recent memories, but I'm happy to see such improvement in one day. These things can turn on a dime, I know, and tomorrow she may be back to a waking coma state, but perhaps this is a harbinger of things to come, good things. Thanks again for all your support.