Physical Therapy

So, two days ago I had my first physical therapy appointments. Really, appointment one was physical therapy, appointment two was occupational therapy, and appointment three was speech therapy. I had been curious about what occupational and speech therapy would actually cover, and surprised to find out:

1. Physical therapy is for making sure I can move around and use my muscles effectively. They’ll help with things like figuring out how to open my mouth the rest of the way and walk and think about things at the same time without falling over.
2. Occupational therapy, interestingly, seems to be primarily about making sure I can do things around the house, like cooking, getting dressed, showering, paying bills, locating important items, shopping for groceries, and (eventually) driving a car.
3. Speech therapy covers what I thought occupational therapy would be about: whatever is involved with  making sure my brain is ready to handle work things. Evidently once I’ve healed up again, they will schedule me for an eight hour day of testing to see what needs to happen. In the meantime, we’re doing exercises to help with memory and starting to analyze basic documentation.

All the appointments were really interesting, and the homework seems like it should be helpful.

The next appointment should be in another two weeks or so, and will be for my one-month-post-craniotomy MRI. They expect most of the swelling to have gone down by that point, so the MRI should give them a better idea of exactly what everything looks like.

At that appointment, we’ll also need to have a reasonable idea of how we’d like to proceed, depending on what they find. I’m pretty curious about that, too.