Thursday June 4th, 2009: Medical Conference

Today was Will's medical conference with Dr. Brock Bowman. Dr. Bowman went over a general summary of Will's brain and spinal cord injuries. He also went over a few of Will's x-rays that were taken after his spinal fusion. There was not much information that was news to me; however he did throw a few statistics our way that were a bit of a reality check for Will. There is a 4-5% chance that Will will walk again (and I'm not talking just get up and go like many of us are able to do). Most people do see an improvement in function about 2-3 levels beyond their initial level of injury. Will is T6-T7 with an ASIA B score. (This is all medical jargon and ASIA is a classification score for spinal cord injuries. ASIA scores range from A (the "worst") to E ("normal"). To give you a quick reference point, Will's level of injury starts between his nipple line and belly button. I appreciate the ASIA classification system, but now it's time to move on and focus on what Will can do. Beyond the bowel & bladder function being compromised, so is sexual function. Fertility does become an issue with SCI, and is more of a problem for men vs. women. There is only a 10% that Will's "little swimmers" will be fertile. So that was it in a nutshell. They taped the entire conference and then gave us the tape so we can listen to it again or share it with other folks who would be interested in hearing it. The fun part of the day was our "family dinner" of Mellow Mushroom take out in Will's room. Y'all up North don't know about Mellow Mushroom :) It's damn good pizza! Tomorrow I will get "trained" with nursing to do Will's catheterizations so we can finally get a "push pass" and go "out" this weekend. Will is continuing to do most of his own IC's and is doing fine with them. Tonight his nurse was going to do some bowel program training with him- you can imagine how excited he was about that.