ABCs

Beware! I'm gonna hittin' ya'll with some technical stuff I've learned over the last year! So, this may get dry in some places..

As we all know I am in a bitter battle with my left arm& hand, Larry. I've just recently decided that if I can get the damn hand to open, just once that I will make tons of progress from there, because, it seems that once I master one physical feat, I can continue to improve on it. So, when the new semester started at the university's clinic, I told my new OT student, Molly that one of my goals was to open my hand..a VERY tall order! Let me tell you why, this what I've learned ao far; Function returns from the head down, big muscles first, small ones last, which is why my leg, who I have dubbed Lucinda, or lucy for short, came back relatively quickly and why my toes and fingers will take longer. many stroke survivors experience intense muscle tone in their affected limbs, this means in my asrm, the muscles pull in, bending my elbow into my body and closing my hand, the tone is so intense it is very difficult to fight against, to get the arm to straighten and fingers to open, because the muscles are so weak, they can't fight against the tone, this is why a lot of survivors get botox injections into the areas where they have the most tone and why I'm on muscle relaxors, the botox paralyzes the muscles that are pulling in, it only lasts for a few months, but that's long enough to try and communicate with the limb, I have tried to get botox and failed, funny, my insurance didn't approve it! I never in my life thought I'd be so desperste to get botox injections! So the trick is finding ways to decrease the tone so we can work with the hand. Because function comes from the head down we are currently working from the shoulder down, Molly'mantra is, "it all comes from the shoulder." Lately we've been working onstraightening my arm, something that is getting easier with each session, in order to do it, I have to take a depp exhale, as if I were in th gym, lifting a heavy weight. I feel very reassured by this progress because when I started walking in rehab I had to a similar exhale to get my leg to move forward, and now I don't have to work as hard.

Today's session with Molly was incredble! She is quite innovative and motivated to help me, I worked with her last sesmester when my student OT was unavaliable, at the time she was persuing s pediatric OT degree, she told mr recently that meeting me last semester changed her mind, thst she decided she wanted to work with adults because of me! What a compliment! Molly showed up at today's session with an aaptive device sh created that we can attach to Charlotte's stroller, making it easier for me to use it and it's an exercise for me to straighten my arm, Charlotte and I did a lap around the therapy room, it takes a large amount of concentration to get my arm to stay straight, so I felt great after completing my lap, keeping my arm straight the whole time, mostly.

Then Molly walked me up to a black board with the capital letters ABC and D written on it, she put a rag in my left hand and held it there, my task was to erase the letters, a scary idea and seemingly impossible, so Molly stood with me and held the rsg in my hand and guided my srms through the motions as I tried to move my arm myself. Now, my disconnect with my arm is so severe that when some one is guding my arm, as Molly was, and I'm trying to do it as well, I can't tell if I'm actually doing it or not, but I felt like I wad and Molly assured me I was, infact doing it myself!

Since working with Molly, I've gained so much control over my arm, I feel like I'm in the home strech! Jazz hands, here I come!