Update #16 on Peter

I hope to post once a day, but I fell asleep on my couch last night and didn’t get one posted on Thursday.

Peter continues to improve. He is eating well. Maybe this is ‘Too Much Info’ for some of you, but Peter is also able to recognize he needs to go to the bathroom and *with help* can stand up out of bed and sit at a portable potty chair to urinate and have BMs. Then he needs help with clean up and back in bed. This is important for Peter in many ways. The point of impact on the back of his head is close to the area that controls the digestive system so it is great to know that it is working properly and his brain understands that he needs to get out of bed and get to the potty. This also helps Peter continue to practice sitting up and standing up and battle the dizziness he feels when doing so. It also stimulates Peter to verbalize some things about what is going on.

Peter’s bandages are off of his head wounds. They are drying nicely, but are very itchy. Peter is doing better at understanding why his head itches and why it feels like it does and we tell him he can lightly touch or pat the wound but can’t pick at it. The impact wound is closed up with 20 staples and is about 15cm long. The place in front where the pressure monitor was implanted has 7 staples and is about 5cm long.

Peter says some really funny things. We can’t help laughing at a lot of what he says. Sometimes it is relevant to the situation, sometimes not. But he seems to have moved beyond nonsense words and there is usually a point to his speech although it is not always immediately clear. It is entirely normal for people with head trauma to hear everything people say, understand what they say, know how to respond, and then respond verbally only to discover later that the words that came out were different from what the brain wanted the mouth to say. This seems to be Peter’s situation, too. It will take 1 to 3 weeks for the blood and extra fluid in the front of his brain to be absorbed so we should continue to see improvement with his speech in the coming days.

Here are some things Peter said or did today:

He often mentioned ice cubes, but I think it was almost always in Chinese… bing kuai (冰塊)

He expressed on a few occasions that he realized that his words weren’t making sense to those around him.

When someone talked with him about food, he said “you can’t defeat watermelon in a bite-for-bite competition”.

He talked *a lot* about flavors… fruity flavors, American and Taiwanese flavors, ice flavors. Best line of the day for me was this trilingual gem about (we think) ice cream “Zebra wei dao con nuts”. “wei dao” is “flavor” in Chinese and “con” is “with” in Spanish.

When I asked Peter “Who are you? Do you know who you are?” He said something like, “I think I must be a prince or a king or something that I’m usually not. Something that isn’t normal. I like it.” I guess being surrounded by maidens feeding you fruit and giving you foot massages will make you feel like a prince or a king.

When I told him that he was crossing the street and was hit by a car and that his head broke the window on the car he said “Wow! That is crazy!” and later “That’s pretty cool” about a few things related to the accident and his recovery.

He thought he was in America and that he was going to go to Taiwan.

He ate pineapple and watermelon in addition to his lunch of rice and veggies.

I’m taking a shift with Peter in about 30 minutes so I need to post this and get over to the hospital I’ll try to post another update tonight.