Day 102 - Watch Out, Watch Out, The Care Team's About

CLEO continues to make progress; she can on occasion, when not too tired, actually walk down our stairs. We have as I have said before, made good progress ourselves in all aspects of managing our daily lives, in terms of developing ways to do things which work for us. Luckily we are able to adapt to the needs we (cleo, me and the girls) all have. Many would not be so lucky, in that I am here through the week, and we are pretty good at figuring things out for ourselves.

Now, the care team which is supposed to offer that help has been pretty much invisible since January and frankly we are not too bothered. However, we did get a call from Mohammed, the care team physio this morning (the aliens have obviously decided that he is of no use to them either) and who is coming to see us tomorrow. At the time I was surprised to hear from him and I did wonder why the call had come, but we found out later from James when we went to physio at the hospital.

What I still do not understand is why we get a visit from Mohammed, who will supposedly set the "goals" which cleo wishes to achieve, but it's another person who actually comes and visits to "do" the physio. Why on earth would one person set the framework for something and then communicate that to a third person to carry out? Surely it makes far more sense for the person who is going to carry out the physio to come and set the framework, because that way they can understand better the needs of the patient.

James told us that he will not be able to see cleo for two weeks after the end of March because two members of the in-hospital staff are away and his time will be spent looking after in-patients while those staff are not there. That is understandable, and I think that James has been instrumental in geting the care team to contact us now to try and put physio in place before this break happens.

cleo has become comfortable with James and his methods, and she trusts him to do what is needed, but not to go too far; his judgement is good and he obviously has an expertise that few others have. None of the care team that visit outside the hospital are neurophysiotherapists, and so we will lose the benefit of James' specific input, at least for 2 weeks or so. He has said that he will continue to keep an eye on the management of the neuro side of things and return to physio with us after the staff return, but that we should give the care team a chance to try and help. I do see a note of cynicism in what he says though because he is as surprised as we are that they have not made more effort to get involved.

So the exercises that cleo can do herself now become doubly important, because at the the very least we must maintain her muscle tone and flexibility while we don't see James. Quite what the goals will be we do not know yet; we will have to wait till tomorrow to see how that goes.

I know that cleo harbours a resistance against the care team, simply because such contact we have had tends to focus on the negative side: what you CANNOT do rather than what you CAN. AS I have said, most of the daily things we need to do we have resolved ourselves, and I am not sure what else they can actually help us with.

I guess we won't believe they are actually coming till they ring the front door bell and walk in. Hannah this evening asked me how to spell "hallucination", I wonder if that was some kind of sign?

We will of course give them a chance, and I hope we can get some results with them, but to be honest, to get anywhere near what James does, they are going to have to be very, very good.

I doubt that they are.