Shriners Hospital

Just to update all of you, we flew to Sacramento California on Monday and arrived at Shriners Hospital. The first couple days were rather frustrating for me and a little for stets. Our plane was late leaving Portland and late getting to Sacramento so we were late getting to the hospital and didn't get to try his new brace until the next morning. I have consistently told the doctor that we want stetson loaded up with physical therapy but due to the number of kids here they only can do about 45 min. to an hour with him a day. He is also required to attend school while he is here. He is not thrilled with that at all. He is learning a little spanish and doing math mostly so far. Jeff, one of our friends from Oregon is attending a junior college not far from here and so he came to see stets today that was really cool. They are going to try and go do something this weekend since stets has a pass to leave the hospital for up to 6 hours. Tomorrow he is going to have about an hour tennis lesson from a guy who is a sanctioned adaptive tennis instructor so that will be lots of fun for him. Today he didn't do any walking at all just alot of stretching which is helping him with his standing. He is making a lot of progress. The doctor and pt (physical therapy) told us that he would probably take about 2 or 3 days to get used to the brace and to learn how to use it and the first day he had it on took about 4 steps and knew how it worked. We are looking at being here about 10 working days which is about 2 weeks, unless he plateaus and then they will just send him home since he can do most of this at home and at therapy. Stetson is not in a private room his roommate arrived on the 15th and believe it or not he is from Oregon too!!! He is paralyzed from the neck down due to a vehicle accident in which he was driving but no one else was hurt in the accident just him. In the past couple days I have really been reminded how lucky we are to have stets and that his injuries could have been a lot worse than he is. We are truly greatful. I have also gotten the priviledge to share a room with Alex's mom and gotten to know her. More to come later.