Evening Update – Dec. 30

The appointment with plastics Wednesday got cancelled. Supposedly they called but didn’t leave a message. The only call my wife got was Monday while she was in with the Orthopedic surgeon.

So Susan and Meg left Wednesday morning and drove all the way to Fairfax to find that the doctor was not in the office.

As a counterpoint, today I took Meg to Family Practice for her first follow up post discharge. We couldn’t get an appointment with the primary care doctor till the end of January so we saw a resident.

I also scheduled an appointment with her primary as soon as possible so she can start getting regular appointments with her to monitor medications, follow her progress, and help us map and plan her treatment with all the specialists.

If you don’t know, Family Practice is a pretty large practice with a few regular doctors and a lot of residents. This means day to day you’d probably see a resident. For most care that’s fine, but if you have major medical then you want to get on a regular schedule with one of the main doctors.

So we decided to set her primary care with one of the doctors there and work to get on that regular schedule.

Anyway, we got to her appointment, went back and got her vitals (she has gained a little over 2.5lbs since discharge last week), then the resident doctor came in.

A little bit later her primary care doctor came in to meet Megan and let us know how happy she was that Meg was out of the hospital and doing well. Apparently she’s been following via the chart entries all along since she heard and has been amazed by her progress.

She was only able to pop in for a couple of minutes because she had a full slate of patients, but it was so great she took the time.

There are a lot of decisions I’m second guessing, but this isn’t one of them.

Susan and I also had a virtual visit with the neuropsychology team at Kennedy Krieger to go over Megs testing and discuss some things related to going back to school.

Basically Megan progressed phenomenally at rehab and on most things is back at “normal.”

There are a couple of higher executive function issues like her vision to language processes that are still slowly coming back, but her problem solving skills are so strong that she is using those to overcome a lot of her weaknesses. Basically if she sees a word she may not be able to read it per normal methods but uses fast problem solving to “guess” the word based on first and last letter, length, and context.

While not ideal and prone to error, this method is working as her brain continues to heal.