(Jon seems to have started a war of goofy jokes! Here’s his returning salvo, typed in lieu of his spelling practice.—L)
What did the duck say when she bought lipstick?
Put it on my bill.
How do leopards stop a VCR?
They press the paws button.
Where did the cow go on Saturday night?
To the moooooooovies.
Meghan (and her whole family) dropped by a week ago, and very kindly stood in for Jon in his body test. And since then, he hasn’t been idle.
Jon has been on the Wii Fit every day, not only having a short or long run, but also doing Balance Games. He’s particularly fascinated by Ski Jumping, which consists of staying in a crouch, weight forward, then standing quickly at the end of the ramp (not jumping, you will lose all points). If you don’t extend quickly enough, or in Jon’s case, your foot pressure is mitigated by you pulling yourself up with your arms on your stander, you will fall off the ramp and roll down the hill, gradually becoming a huge snowball.
The view from the top of the jump ramp
The first day, Jon was nothing but a snowball, but that was okay by him: it’s hysterically funny. The next day he announced he wanted to be a snowball again, and I thought, “Oh, my aching back. What a waste.” (since I have to assist with everything). But Laura happened to come in, and she focused on his feet (placing them, keeping them from turning—the uneven tone of CP makes even basic standing a tricky, unpredictable event), while I focused on his gently touching his thighs and torso to remind him how to stand. He gets to the end of the ramp and BOOM!…Jon was flying. And he pretty much has been since.
Jon successfully jumping
Jon’s personal best is now 125 metres over two flights. But being a snowball is still pretty hilarious too.
Jon has also improved heavily in Slalom Skiing (as of today, he’s the reigning household champ) and Soccer Heading (beating my current score, but not Laura’s), but boy, a workout for him is a workout for me and Laura. As Laura keeps the feet more or less in position, I have to help Jon lean his torso, focusing his weight from left to right. It leaves my torso pretty tired. We can’t do more than 10 minutes at a time. It’s particularly interesting when he gets a bout of clonus in either foot, which completely confuses the Wii Fit balance board.
Between the walker and the Wii Fit, Jon is focusing more on pushing his weight into the floor, something we’ve been trying to work on for the past ten years. This bodes well for the future.
Yesterday we saw Avenue Q, a musical playing until the end of August at the Elgin Theatre. This is a show that we’ve waited over four years to see, ever since its Broadway incarnation won a Tony for Best Musical, and we bought the Original Cast Album CD. The version we saw was a touring show, but like the Sweeney Todd we saw last year, the cast was superlative and in no way second-rate (unlike some touring Evitas I’ve seen).
If Avenue Q could be summed up in one concept it would be “Sesame Street for grownups”. Many of the characters are played by Muppet-like puppets, with their human voices/manipulators (often more than one) plainly in view. Other characters are purely human actors, while the puppets are subdivided further into human- and monster-types. These differences make it logical for the ensemble to break into song about how “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”.
Ah, the songs! They are bouncy, hummable, infuriatingly catchy ditties, with tunes eminently suitable for preschoolers and adults alike. However, the subject matters are maybe not something you’d want to let your toddler hear: Titles such as “It Sucks to be Me”, “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?”, “Schadenfreude”, and most hilariously, “The Internet Is For Porn” give a reasonable idea of the topics covered in the show. Prudes also may not want to watch the puppet sex scenes, or hear the infrequent F-bombs, but no one over the age of 13 or so is likely to get too offended.
The story revolves around Princeton, a young college graduate trying to make his way in the world. His neighbours on Avenue Q (he wanted to live on Avenue A, but Q was the highest-lettered street he could afford) include unemployed Brian, who dreams of being a comedian; Brian’s fiancée Christmas Eve, a Japanese therapist who can’t find clients (maybe because of language difficulties, or perhaps her abrasive personality); Nick and Rod, an Ernie and Bert-ish set of roommates with gay undertones; Trekkie Monster, a Cookie Monster clone with a seamier addiction than cookies; and sweet kindergarten teaching assistant Kate, who Princeton falls in love with. Not to mention building superintendent Gary Coleman (played by a woman).
Princeton and his friends struggle to find dates, jobs, and most importantly, their purpose in life, navigating past bad choices (personified by the cuddly Bad Idea Bears) and one-night stands, and finding out that starry-eyed idealism often must be tempered to cope with adult life. This makes Avenue Q sound depressing, but the infectious music and bright-eyed cast make the show anything but.
I can honestly say that I never thought the day would come where Jon would be entranced by joke book humour, the way many boys are, repeating their favourite corny joke over and over from a limited selection of all-corny jokes. Not that it’s a physical joke book, but an online collection at the Between the Lions PBS site. But the rest of the behaviour is identical, especially the uncontrollable cackling laughter that makes you wonder if he’ll die from asphyxiation or loss of bladder control first.
Then comes the swell of pride, since his favourite joke is a pun. Ah yes, Daddy’s boy. 🙂
Where does a cow go on Saturday night?
To the Mooooo-vies
Thanks, you’ve been a great audience. Try the veal.
Jon and Grandma. For the first time we risked bringing the walker to Grandma and Grandpa’s, instead of his wheelchair. Travel was slower, sometimes, but there was more effort and pride too.
So Grandpa, through canny instinct and stealthy stake-outs, found a Wii Fit last month, and gave it to Laura for her birthday. We started into it immediately, but found it much harder than we had expected from the trailers. But we’ve hiked up our socks, and in our spare moments we’ve begun the various activities and started unlocking new games and exercises.
There’s a heart-breaking element to this though, and it’s Jon. We initially thought that because of his cerebral palsy, he wouldn’t be able to use the step-like Wii Fit Balance Board. Once he saw others playing it though, he was confused and sad, and couldn’t see why he couldn’t play. But I got an idea: why couldn’t we use Jon’s stander?
It seemed feasible. But sadly, the required body test just doesn’t seem to accept Jon on the balance board, even with the stander. It constantly would say he was shifting too much and asking to reset itself. We’ve tried about ten times over two sessions. Sigh. Jon has taken the disappointment well enough, but clearly his feelings are hurt.
At the cottage, he kind-of-cheated and used Meghan’s profile, which worked out about as well as possible. Jon can’t wait for Meghan’s next visit to our house, so she can fake a body test for him (they are roughly the same weight, and that’s all we need.)
In the meantime, using Grandma and Tamo’s profile, Jon has discovered running in the Wii Fit’s virtual park. It is the one game on the Wii Fit that doesn’t use the balance board. Instead it measures your energy through the bouncing Wii Remote in your pocket while you run in place in your living room.
At first, Jon just shook the Wii Remote with his hand, creating a super-fast running character who disobeyed commands to slow down, and thus tripped a lot. But then I had another idea…and it worked. It’s a more intensive version of his MEDEK wall exercises, and Jon loves it. And it makes a nice complement to Jon’s activities in his new walker. It’s a little hard on me, but with his enthusiasm…Go Jon go!
In the meantime, Wii Fit development team: you need to tune the Balance Board to include the disabled. You probably have a few hundred thousand or more in Japan to work with, or feel free to invite us over for some testing! Jon will work for sashimi and tempura!
So what was I up to at St. Mike’s for two other days of the week?
Well, one day I was in a study of head injury cases, as they try to find the commonalities of concussion, and recovery from such. Of course, they can’t get a baseline measurement (you can’t do a “before” measure if you don’t know who’s going to get bonked on the head!), so they do a series of measurements periodically afterwards. This is for two reasons: to try and get a general idea of the pattern of recovery, and also to use the data as a guideline in testing the severity of a head injuries in Emergency.
At the end of that session, I had a follow-up CAT scan for both the study doctor and the neurosurgeon who oversaw me when I was in the hospital in June (and who had been considering opening my skull during the most stressful moments).
On Thursday was my 8 a.m. visit with Dr. Cusimano, whose resident gave me a detailed physical to see if I had lost any function. The good surgeon came in a little early, so he took over the second half of my examination. On occasion, he was quite stern with the student, making sure he understood the precision of the tests and not to asking leading questions. Since I had majored in Brain & Behaviour Psychology at Queen’s 20 years ago, I found this vaguely familiar and fascinating, and occasionally added my observations to help where the examination was lacking precision.
Aside from getting fatigued easier (and that is dissipating), I have only one noticeable after-effect from the head injury: my sense of smell is on the blink. It isn’t entirely broken, but there is always a predominant smell, which changes depending on certain circumstances. If I’m lucky it will be like now: lemon, or some other acceptable food smell. I have caught some smells on the fly—we got stuck behind a garbage truck the other day, which definitely was not filled with lemons 😉 . And it does heavily affect my sense of taste in the extra dimensions that are provided by smell.
But the doctor was starting to wrap up the interview by then, so he interrupted the resident’s summary of my smell report with “Ah! Anosmia!”—which is the complete lack of smell, and not what I have. He started quizzing his student about the construction of the words “anosmia” and “ageusia”. He then proceeded to show me (and provide me a print-out of) my CAT scan the day of the accident, and then two months later.
So let’s take a look, shall we? Okay so a quick summary of the head. You got yer skull, and you got yer brain, which is wrapped in the protective cushion layers called the meninges. The inner surface of the skull isn’t a perfect negative of the brain’s sulci and gyri, due to the protective meningal layers, but it does have the general contours.
If you whack your head right (ahem, this is foreshadowing) you can get the brain to jerk inside its protective cave, causing the meningal layers and maybe a little bit of brain to get ripped on the inner skull. Then comes the blood, which drips into the frontal cortex, and a bit into the back of the right temporal cortex. (The CAT x-ray images are flipped left to right and show two different levels of my brain.) The white blotches are blood.
Those blood drops can screw up the neuronal activity something awful, and is the reason I don’t remember much of my next four days, including the devotion of my wife and parents through the many hours in emergency and my room (thank you folks, I’ll never be able to know what you went through), and have only patchy impressions of the visits of Reid and Andy. And remember, if I said anything stupid or embarrassing: remember, I call BRAIN INJURY!!!
Next up are shots from eight weeks later. They are rough approximations of the latitudes of the first two pics, but not exact by any means (the doc lined them up to print in about five seconds). Also, my conscious head is at a different horizontal angle than my unconscious head, so any major structural differences you think you see are not major damage. That said…there is subtle damage.
See that black shadowy powder where the blood splotches used to be? That’s glia scar tissue, reacting to the invading blood. (The glia cells are the subserviant cells to the brain cells (neurons), helping keep the chemical, oxygen and energy balance and generally being protective filler. In the brain they tend to inhibit the regrowth of severed neurons by forming scar tissue.)
So what does this damage mean? What have I lost? The doctor scoffed. “The brain is plastic, and with relatively light injury like this the functions remap within a week or two.” Since I’m not showing any of the known chronic signs of trouble: impulsive spending, bad memory, irritability, anger, depression, major bouts of crying, or trouble sleeping, and they can’t find any physiological trouble, things are pretty good, all things considered.
But then came the most negative comment by the doctor: My sense of smell. What’s the prognosis? “It could come back, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
I will take this comment seriously, but with a grain of salt. He did tell his student that those nerves can regrow, but they are very fine. He didn’t quite have the right idea of how my sense of smell was affected. So remapping my sense of smell entirely may be quite difficult, or take a long time. But some of my reading on the subject suggests that this may not be neuronal at all, but due to sinus cavities issues like infections. Stay tuned.
And in the end, I’d rather the doctor be conservative in his predications, so I can exceed his hopes. And I’m sure Dr. Cusimano would be delighted to be wrong.