Happy Friday--Cameron is doing great!!!

It has been an amazing week for Cameron, and she continues to make progress in her therapies. Physical therapy has shown the most noticeable gains, and Cams is walking quite well. She works on the split treadmill each day, and has built up to four minutes by her third series of reps each day. She understands the progress she is making and is becoming increasingly excited with her success. For instance, during PT today she walked really far and got really excited about it.

Occupational therapy is more challenging for Cameron, but she is making progress in this area as well. She was fit with an arm brace today to protect her ligaments from getting stretched too far. They also are going to use a special tape for her shoulder, which is tending to droop and could also stretch the ligaments. And they basically don't want that to happen because once the ligaments get stretched, then she won't be able to regain her muscle strength as easily.

Speech is going well, and her therapist is focusing on comprehension and memory activities. Cameron is also drinking all of her liquids with a thickening gel to help control her coughing when she drinks, which is wonderful because Cameron coughs all of the time with everything that she drinks.

Cameron is really enjoying her therapeutic recreation sessions and has started attending group sessions as well. She has at least three hours of continuous work each day, so she's basically in therapy from 8:30 to 11:30 solid. It's exciting because she's building up to not having to come back to the room to lay down for 30 minutes and get right back up to go to another therapy session. This obviously wears her out, so she's sleeping much better at night.

Medically, Cameron is also doing well. She did experience a second seizure today, but it only involved her eyes moving to the left for a very short period of time, maybe 10 seconds. She was a little shaky after this, but recovered well. Dr. Hartman is going to increase her Depakote dose, which should take care of these little breakthrough seizures that she's having. When Dr. Hartman was visiting this afternoon I asked him how Cameron was doing compared to other hemispherectomy patients, and he said she's above the curve, she's doing better than the average child that comes in to have a hemispherectomy. They are very excited and pleased with Cameron's progress so far, so that was very exciting to hear.

Sometime today we will have a better idea of how much more time we'll be here, but we're anticipating another two weeks.

Love, the Motts.

p.s.--thanks again to Stephanie for dictating this from Shelly--you got skills girl!!!