#184

Elaine had a good night of sleep and made it through her three 30-minute arm stretch sessions. This morning, Elaine started her eye therapy. Staci picked her up and they headed to the doctor, not exactly sure what they were getting into. The doctor has named Elaine, "pussy cat." We don't know why but it makes us laugh.

She worked with the therapist today and they did some eye exercises. The good news is, all the parts are there and working. Her brain is awake and understands the messages, and her eyes are both working. The part they are working on is getting it to all work together. There are lots of moving parts, but they are not all in sync. In the first exercise, looking through some special glasses, Elaine held a pen in each hand. She would have two starting points on each side of the paper and would draw the lines until they would connect. The first few seconds were great, they you would see one hand stop working because one of her eyes would stop working, and the other eye would work overtime. She would suppress one eye because of information overload and one eye would shut down, sometimes the right, sometimes the left. The therapist would tap the paper in her line of vision with the eye that quit, and it would wake back up. The fact that she was quickly responsive with the reminder, is a very good sign.

Her up close vision is very good, its just the distance that it seems to be more of a problem. The therapist is very confident that she will be able to fix the problem. She was so impressed with how well Elaine did today. She had to modify her program to make the exercises more challenging. The last thing Elaine did was in front of a large touch screen. The program would run various programs that Elaine would do. The first one shows a bunch of jumbled letters rotating in a circle on the screen. Elaine has to put them in order as quickly as possible. Staci was especially impressed with the speed Elaine did it in while multitasking. What the results showed was that overall she did excellent. The area of concern was the bottom part of the screen. She would have a tougher time hitting the moving letters when they were at the bottom of the screen. If the screen was a clock, she had trouble between 4 and 8. Staci did most of the exercises with Elaine and was so impressed with how well Elaine was doing. It was exciting!

After therapy, Elaine went home for another round with the torture chamber and then rested. Tonight, we all went to the swim team awards banquet. Everyone loved having Fred and Elaine at the swim meets this year!

Tomorrow, Elaine has her injection in her arm. She has to let it rest for 48 hours after the injection, so no therapy for the next few days. Dr. Smith also gets a day off of his inoculation duties, but he'll back at it on Thursday for a few more days. Please keep Elaine in your thoughts and prayers tomorrow. We are very optimistic that this is the beginning of the end! She is already a little ahead, having been using the torture chamber for a week. She is one tough cookie!