I used to bike right by here last year on the way to North Station to catch the train up to teach at Endicott. Notice the duck boat right under the Museum of Science.
The schedule here is pretty rigorous. Three hours of therapy a day. Friday they started me off with Speech Therapy, which was mostly about cognitive function. I didn't think I needed it, since I didn't get hit in the head or lose consciousness in the accident. Sure enough I passed with flying colors. So the therapist and I mostly just chatted; she and her husband took a trip last summer to France, so we talked about that a little.
Then it was a short session of Occupational Therapy, which was the first chance I had to get out of bed since getting here. OT is basically how to handle every day tasks like getting in and out of the bathroom. My occupational therapist was also the first person to clarify exactly how I should be approaching the "no weight on your left leg for three months" rule: I have to imagine a grape under my foot that I'm trying not to break. It turns out I was putting a little too much pressure on it previously, even sometimes when pushing myself up in bed.
After lunch was Physical Therapy and more OT. Physical Therapists apparently have a reputation for being sadistic--my PT at Brigham said a friend once asked if they were given puppies to torture on the first day of PT school--but mine were nice. I'm approaching it like I'm an athlete in training. It's very much like weight training, except you can't even lift your leg let alone the weights.
One hiccup to the day was that the pain meds didn't get to me when they needed to. This is one of two areas where Spaulding is much worse than Brigham was: the first is the old-person food (overcooked vegetables, generally tasteless) and the second is that they don't bring me my pain meds unless I ask. They were an hour and a half late with the meds right at the point when I needed them most, after PT. To make it worse, when I finally realized and asked for them the nurses were in the middle of a shift change, which slowed things down a bunch. So I was up to about a 5/10 on the pain scale, which I had only happened once in the last couple days. In general the pain is pretty low, especially when I don't move the leg. I'm taking half my dosage at night, and the full dosage during the day, and supplementing this with Tylenol when I need to.
The other annoyance is that they won't let me go to the bathroom by myself, even though I did it a couple times at Brigham. I'm a fall risk, and I have a bed alarm.
I slept much better last night.
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