Update #14 on Peter

It has been one full week since the accident.

I’m finishing up 8 hours with Peter and I’ve seen much improvement during my time with him.

Probably the most fun today was when the Yankees and Royals were finishing up their game. The Yankees are *HUGE* here in Taiwan because Wang Chien-ming is from Taiwan. Peter’s dad, Rick, and I decided to turn on the TV for Peter this morning and I found the baseball game. Peter isn’t a big baseball fan, but he often looked at the TV. Right as the game was ending, Peter started talking about Pete Rose and sliding into 2nd base. He talked about the importance of sliding naturally and not forcing it too much. We had a somewhat disjointed conversation that was focused on sports. Peter has said a lot of other things today… some have made sense… some not so much. At one point, he said “Leonardo” a few times… maybe talking about Ninja Turtles? We weren’t sure. He also said, “Daddy’s boy” when looking at his dad. The ball game is being replayed on TV now so maybe he’ll talk more baseball later.

Last night, on a suggestion from Bev Skiles, I put a pen in Peter’s hand and gave him a pad of paper. He was immediately interested and knew what to do. He wrote his name phonetically in Chinese and wrote at least the “Pe” in his name. He later added the Chinese characters to the page along with a lot of marks that we can’t decipher.

I brought in 2 balls for Peter to play with today. One is smaller and fits in his hand. It is covered with little spikes. I hoped he would use it to exercise his left hand as it shows less strength than the right. He has used it in this way occasionally. The larger ball is also textured and we’ve kept it at his feet most of the time and he likes to kick it, roll it, and squeeze it at the end of the bed.

Peter has sat up on a few occasions today. He sometimes tries to do this himself without prompting, but he has allowed us to sit him up each time we’ve told him what we want and start lifting him. We need to sit him up to start learning if he gets dizzy. As long as he isn’t too dizzy, we may be able to stand him up. So far he has sat for almost 10 minutes at the longest, but gets pretty dizzy so he isn’t ready to stand yet.

The ear, nose and throat doctor stopped by earlier and gave him a few tests. She can’t tell a whole lot until Peter is more able to respond with precision about what he hears and doesn’t hear, but she took a large piece of dried blood out of Peter’s left ear and a smaller piece out of the right. That had to help his hearing.

When Christy left a couple hours ago, Peter waved. Craig stopped by for a short time and when Craig left, Peter gave a high five and a fist bump when Craig asked for them.

He gave a BIG smile once when he saw Jen-Jen’s camera.

I’ve been trying to think of a way to explain this new phase we are in… and I wonder if this will work: for the first week, Peter was taking slow but large steps on the road to recovery. Now we seem to be in a part of the journey where the steps are much smaller, but also are faster. These steps are all in the right direction at the moment.