By Jennifer Ensor
On Sunday, Caitlin, Claire and I (Jennifer) paid another flying visit to Mornington to see Mum before she heads off to the Prince Charles Rehab Unit in Brisbane – hopefully on Wednesday all things going well. We’ve been travelling down to the Mornington Peninsular from Sale once a week (6 hour round trip) for the past month, so it’s certainly been great to see Mum making gains each time we visit—and yesterday was the best we’ve seen her. She was alert and chatty, asking about Rick, what we’d all been up to, and Caitlin’s university offers (#warning—proud parent moment—Caitlin has been offered a place at both RMIT in Melbourne and the University of Newcastle to study a degree in biomedical science). Mum even suggested that perhaps Caitlin could focus on stroke as a field of study—a great idea!
As usual, we arrived around lunch time—and as some of you might know, I’m a speech pathologist—so it’s been wonderful seeing Mum regain her eating independence. No more thickened fluids (they are truly dreadful if you’ve ever tried them) or puree—it’s now thin fluids (so hurrah to normal cups of tea), minced meat and soft, chopped veges, with extra gravy. As Gennevene mentioned in the previous blog post, Mum’s biggest challenge at mealtimes is to remember to slow down the pace of her eating. While I didn’t launch into a rendition of ‘Take it Slow’ ( I don’t think anyone in the communal dining room wanted to hear that!), I did find it helped if Mum was prompted to put down her spoon between mouthfuls. As Gen also mentioned, food can easily build up/pocket in Mum’s left cheek because of her muscle weakness. The more she rushes, the faster the food residue builds up (in her oral cavity and possibly in her pharynx), thus putting her at risk of aspiration i.e. food/fluid entering the larynx and then going into the lungs; aspiration pneumonia is often the result if this occurs. Fortunately Mum’s cough reflex seems quite good from what I’ve seen. But to prevent this build up, Mum’s speechie Emma has advised Mum to use a double swallow (i.e. swallow, then swallow again), tongue sweeps of the left cheek cavity, and finger clears as required—it was great to see Mum remembering to do this without me nagging her to.
After lunch, Mum had a go at some of her occupational therapy and speech therapy/reading exercises—yes, they give you homework in rehab! The OT visual-spatial exercises proved to be quite a challenge—a rather complex, black and white geometrical drawing was placed on the left side of the table (Mum has left-sided neglect) and Mum needed to try to copy the drawing onto a piece of paper placed on the right. It was quite tricky so after a little while, we tried the reading exercises, with fantastic results. As you may know, Mum’s reading has been affected by the stroke and her subsequent left-sided neglect. Reading exercises are focusing on getting Mum to track left to right, otherwise she tends to ignore the left side of the page and/or word. A bright pink fluoro margin helped Mum locate the left hand side of the page and with some physical and verbal prompting she was able to find the letter/word adjacent to the line. She was then reading two and three word phrases like ‘a healthy breakfast’ and ‘a sailing boat’—great stuff.
After a very social lunch, and therapy session, Mum was tuckered out so we said farewell so she could take a well earned ‘Noni nap’. Whilst we’re sad to see Mum leave, we’ve all got our fingers crossed that come Wednesday, she and Dad will be headed back home to sunny Queensland. And we’re hoping we can visit her and Dad again after Easter when Rick gets back from his overseas ‘sojourn’. We’re certainly hoping to see even more gains next time we see her.
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