Outpatient Physical Therapy After TBI: The Little Success

Outpatient Physical Therapy After TBI: Lori Part Eleven

Our discussion continues with the outpatient physical therapy after TBI and what little success Lori had with it. When asked how long she was kept immobile:

So you were still not really ambulating, not walking well, that first months.  How long were you in the crib?

I don’t know.   So if I think of seasons, that was June when I got there, and it seems not long, because it seems like by the time fall had begun I wasn’t even in a wheelchair.  And I don’t remember being in a wheelchair but I know I was.  Does that progression help?

That means after you got home to your parents, you went back and got a considerable amount of physical therapy, outpatient physical therapy after TBI?

Yes.

What do you remember about that?

I remember when I was in outpatient therapy I was doing all kinds of physical movements.  And at first it didn’t make sense to me, at first it made me mad because, I don’t know – like they were having me reach for things that were just silly, that I would never reach for anyways.

And they would have me stand on one foot, which was silly because I was 25 and I was not going to stand around on one foot, but later Donna, my PT that was about my age that I befriended, she helped me to understand. I don’t know how she did that, but she helped me to understand that I needed to do these silly little things so that I could get back into being an adult.

And so she tried to find the best way, the most interesting ways for me, so I remember playing basketball with a bunch of crumpled up paper and throwing it into a wastebasket.  I remember being in the parking lot at the hospital, which is where I had outpatient therapy, and Donna had drawn a hopscotch, whatever you call a hopscotch thing, and I remember trying to do hopscotch.

I remember being outside with therapy in the hospital parking lot and trying to walk on the, in front of parking, where people park in parking structures there’s often a cement pylon thing and I remember trying to walk on those.

So the pylon things would be like balance beams?

Yeah, yeah, very much so.  And I remember jumping. I remember that I wanted to jump and I remember learning how to jump.  And I remember, for some reason and I wrote this in my book, it was very important to me to be able to stand up and put my pants on.

I just somehow thought that everybody did that, so I remember saying to my physical therapist that I wanted to be able to stand up and put my pants on.  That might’ve been in the hospital when I first started that and Donna helped me.  But I remember continuing that in physical therapy.  You know, it got so that it, it just became very important to me.  I don’t know, it took a long time before I could do it, but I could do it.

Next in Part Twelve – Transition to Independence after Severe Brain Injury