Day 71 - Aug 10, 2008

Kevin was more awake today. He got some pain medication at about noon and then didn't seem to need anymore until almost 10pm tonight. Breezy and I noticed today too, that he seems to be feeling a little bit more on his right side. She tickled his foot and toes today and he moved his toes. He also rubbed his right eye a couple of times and just kept scratching that side of his face all day. I can only hope that he is starting to feel that side because it may mean that he will at least have some functionality.

And this might have been a coincidence, but we were watching School of Rock tonight and they were playing Smoke on the Water and I swear Kevin was trying to make the intro sounds to that song. You know...the doh doh dohh, doh doh dadoh (I sure hope y'all get what I am trying to say here, lol). He didn't really say the noise, but you could hear some sound coming out in the right beat for it. Who knows for sure, but I really think that he was trying to hum along.

That about sums up our day. We just watched some of the Olympics and then some movies. I had a couple of questions so I will get to them:

To Linda from Ford City: I purchased a CD player for Kevin the first week he was here. The problem is that his choice of music is heavy metal and the nurses (and I) just can't handle it. We try to listen on occasion - but it's not often. Besides that, I wouldn't really know what heavy metal songs/bands he likes. I did buy him some Tom Petty and Moe made him a CD of some of his favs and we do listen to those often. As to the Metal stuff - I bought Atreyu and Disturbed and Drowning Pool. If anyone knows of anything that he really does like for sure - please let me know. Oh - and I bought him an Adam Sandler CD, but every other word is the "F" word so we can't really listen to that either.

To the EB Military Guys: Y'all wanted to know when we might come home and roughly what our schedule will be like. First, I want to say that it's really not able to be determined yet, but with that being said, we have been told his total recovery period will be between 2-5 years. Yes, you read it right. 2-5 YEARS. I know of one person who had a similar situation to Kevin and he has been between here and Tampa for 4 1/2 years now. He is nearly complete with his recovery.

I was told today that we may be leaving within the next 2-3 weeks for Tampa (barring any infections) and we will come back here for his cranioplasty instead of Walter Reed like I had thought. This is my choice as I have researched where I feel that we will have the best results and where we will feel safest. Please understand that I am not putting WR down, but have been told that the area around WR in Wash DC is not as safe as I would like. I know that both this hospital and WR are well versed in cranioplasties so I am confident that we will do fine here. Anyway, we will go to Tampa until Kevin is ready for the cranioplasty. He needs to be infection free for 6 months before we can have the titanium plate put in his head and this means that if Kev is fine for 5 1/2 months and gets sick - we start all over again. So on the off chance that Kev gets no infections, we will come back here in about 5 months for the surgery. We will recover here and then possibly (probably if it's that soon) go back to Tampa and then back here to San Antonio for further burn rehab. Of course, this could all be totally wrong. There is just no way to plan for anything in the future here. Too much can happen at the drop of a hat.

Any other questions? Throw them at me. Sometimes they jog my memory and it reminds me of something I forgot to mention.