In the service of self-care and not utterly exhausting myself, I took the night off and curled up with a nice book (by some guy named @afhenley) and a beer or two.

For tonight’s update, then, you get a guest post by Dan himself!

Day
18 Update: Today I woke up refreshed but really warm! Seems that the
morning low-grade fever is continuing to nag so they ran blood tests to
ensure that there was no infection. The good news is that I don’t have
an infection, the low-grade fever is probably just a mild cold/ick that
is going on.

First up was Occupational Therapy, which their goal is to get you
ready to go home as you are now (whereas Physical Therapy is designed to
get you better). With that in mind, had a shower with a walker transfer
to rely less on the Wheelchair overall. The Therapist made sure to note
that my use of walker is getting better every day.

After lunch, I had Physical Therapy where we went up and down stairs
that were the same height as what we have at home. While it was only 4
steps, was quite exhausted after each round of going up and then down.
We are going to try to use the regular stairwell in the next few days to
see if I can handle the 9 steps to get to the landing, and then the
other 9 steps to finish going upstairs in time to get home. We finished
with some stretching, which when you don’t use muscles for a while in
your legs, they can  get really tight.

Finally, had 30 minutes of Recreational Therapy and learned how to
play Rummikub. May need to pick that up for general game play at home.

Shortly before dinner, Ian from Chambana (Champaign/Urbana, IL) came up to visit and
brought donuts and tasty sodas and we chatted for about 2 hours. Was
great seeing him and catching up him. He warned me about some potential
pain once to nerves really get back to working.

Thank you everyone for keeping up with the updates and sending out the Love/Support/Thoughts/Prayers/etc. It is much appreciated!

Also posted on Tumblr at: http://ift.tt/2mGzYER