Ahhh, Time

gaylord the rooster and his mirror
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I just got off the phone with my brother in NY. He asked if the QOB was doing better and I said that yes, she was. And she is: she can sign her name now, which is fairly awesome, and she's pretty coherent a lot of the time, which is, let's face it, about the best one can say of anyone.

"Really?" said my brother, sounding unconvinced.
"Yes," I said, "She still has a lot of trouble with numbers and time and stuff, but she's definitely more in the ballpark. Like, last week at the neurologist's office, he asked her what month it was and she said, "It's the 104th.""
"Uh huh." said my brother.
"But then yesterday at the occupational therapists," I continued enthusiastically, "When the therapist asked her when she had the stroke, she said, "On the 4th of Friday!" Isn't that great?"
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"Wait," I said uneasily, "I mean, now that I've said that out loud it doesn't sound so good. Somehow it sounded more promising in my head."
"Yeah, in your head," said my brother, or words to that effect.

It is better, though. She's sort of homing in on the idea of days and dates and times and numbers. At least that's what I think. I have no idea what the therapists think. I will probably find out, since she's going to be there a lot from now on, what with occupational therapy and speech therapy and physical therapy. There are many different kinds of therapy out there, apparently, and I'm not even including the kind I used to go to, where I talked about my horrible procrastination and inability to find a boyfriend and then had to stand in a circle and feel my inner warrior. The therapist's office where the QOB is going isn't exactly an office - it's a big hall at a rehabilitation center, with lots of different kinds of therapists working with lots of different kinds of patients. This is kind of distracting, like when the woman in the wheelchair kept on moaning until her therapist promised her ice cream, which also made her moan, but, um, differently. And then there was the man doing a sort of very serious Ministry of Silly Walks thing up and down while holding first a mirror and then something that looked like an English Beat album cover from 1984, all black and white op art checks. Maybe he was stuck in some kind of late 70s/early 80s vortex. Meanwhile, our therapist was getting the QOB to move plastic discs from one board to another and timing her, which would have worked better had I not gotten confused as to how many rows there were on each side (she was timing each hand separately) and so screwed up all the results. My mom made me go back to the office after that although, honestly, I probably should have stayed and moved discs around for a while until I got clearer on the concept.

But it's all progress, of one kind or another, I guess. When I left the rehab center yesterday I kept thinking about how surprisingly fragile human beings are, after all. There seem to be so many ways for them to break. I also thought that I couldn't do the work those therapists were doing for even ten minutes before I would go completely, screamingly batshit insane, which makes it even more amazing that that's the kind of work my daughter does. It's good that they're out there. And it's also good that we're all here and, on Tuesdays, watching movies and having pizza with my mom and the QOB, which is how I spent my evening. We're all kind of fragile and we need to stick together.