Enjoy this picture of what has been a part of my in home therapy. Incubating eggs and lovingly taking care of the hatchlings!
As a continuation of yesterday’s post…onto OT!
This wonderful guy shares pictures of his sweet daughter and talks to me about his wife and their church at home. That’s the easy part of my therapy!!
Onto the straining parts - literally straining! We do horizontal eye tracking…which has gotten better because before I couldn’t move my eyes at all! I’ll take the ten degrees crossing midline! I have horizontal gaze palsy…so this has been a difficult feat! But we do ten horizontal eye moves on each side….and we do five reps of them. Talk about tiring my eyes! Usually by the fifth or maybe the seventh one, I have to dab away the tears pooling in my eyes. Plus, he can tell when my eyes start getting tired because they stay at midline. No movement!
After those, we do the vertical eye movements. Which are the easiest ones and he expresses that! It’s like my eyes get a little break!
Then onto the diagonal tracking. The right side always turns out better than the left side. Maybe that’s the case for my body as a whole? In PT, my left side is weaker than my right side. But on the right diagonal tracking I can see singly. The left side however, I see two fingers… I never know which one to focus on. It’s like my eyes jump to the one that ends up closer to me as that is easier. I should challenge my eyes and brain more next time. We do the same amount and the same reps as before!
Lastly, we work on convergence and divergence! As his finger gets closer to my face..I see singly. As his finger gets further from my face, I see double! We are done!!! As I sit and dab my eyes to death.
Normally when I have speech after OT my eyes are so red and pooling with tears. Today, since I’m so tired from the week I have dark bags under my eyes as well! She normally asks if I’m okay. Yes, yes I am!
We hit it hard today. She told me she was going to keep track of everytime I inappropriately giggled and everytime I exclaim ‘yay!’ Those are both new quirks of mine!
Today I kept my range at around 170-190 hertz. So not the exact 150 for a woman of my age - but pretty darn close! We worked on a good fluctuation range as I don’t want to get super high - that would be weird.
I also worked on trying to move my lips and face. I have facial paralysis and palsies of the 3rd, 4th, 6th, & 7th nerves! When we worked on these things, I could feel the lower right side of my face moving and the upper left side of my face moving. So I can only raise my left eyebrow and frown on my right side. When I try to smile, it actually looks like a frown.
I tried puckering and then immediately smiling. Watching myself in the mirror, I internally yell at myself! Come on, Jess!!! SMILE!
I then try to curl my upper lip to show my upper teeth…no movement. Nada. I haven’t been able to show my teeth in almost two years.
She then inserted a tongue depresssor on…you guessed it…the LEFT side of my mouth and told me to pucker tightly and prevent her from moving the stick away from mouth as she pressed on the inside of my cheek.
She told me she sees improvement every time. For home, I am to do that with a tongue depressor. But instead of pushing out, then immediately retracting - I am to push out and hold it for ten seconds to work on the labial muscle.
We worked on different word sounds and sentences. All that have the ‘f’ sound in them as that is my weaker sound!!
Overall, therapy has been tough. But people are seeing the improvements. I get complimented on the way I walk amd talk now. So I know it’s working!
Now today I have a national interview…you’ll hear more about that one soon!
I hope you all have a blessed day!
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