OT: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Staples

Gadgets - Trust me there are more gadgets than you can imagine. This gadget is designed to pick things up. As my neighbor Loren discovered today though, it won't hold a full styrofoam glass of water. Leave it to Loren to decide to clean the floor in my room!

Sock on...yeah, I don't think if does sock off.

Here's the very cool 3-in-1 commode which you can actually place over your commode at home. This will give you some height and the handles help you get up and down. Is this TMI or what??!!

The gel ice bags are worth their weight in gold. This is truly something to look forward to following a painful pt session. Here's the crazy thing about them. This is a rehab facility. The only place these suckers are used is in the pt room. We're supposed to ice the knees at least 6 times a day, so if you have pt twice a day, you still need to get ice on them 4 more times. In the rooms, they have these cheap little "accu-therm" bags that hold next to nothing and don't get cold enough to do anything. Apparently the good gel packs have a habit of disappearing, so here you are in rehab where you can't really do a good job of icing your knees for some strange reason that no one understands.

Each morning the aide changes the dressings (the white strips) and wraps my legs in ace bandages and puts on the slipper socks. The bandages help to keep the swelling down and they stay on until around 8 at night. That's the end of visiting hours and time to take the second sponge bath of the day at the sink in the room. You can kind of see the lines drawn across my knees. The surgeon matches up the lines when he staples the incision shut. I have no idea how many staples were used, but each knee is just a full line of staples all along the white bandages.

Getting out of bed requires you to heft the dead weight of your legs over the side, let gravity help to painfully bend the legs to the floor, push up from the bed, and shift weight onto the walker.

Getting in and out of bed presents all kinds of challenges. A hospital bed allows you to lean on the railings to get some leverage. Occupational Therapy helps you practice all sorts of everyday tasks. In fact, this facility has a mocked up apartment with a bathroom, bedroom, living room, dining room and kitchen. It has a washer, dryer, fridge, sofa, bed...all the stuff you have to deal with at home. Diane took pictures of my OT session on Tuesday.