August 7, 2017 9:30 pm

Another relatively uneventful day for Josh. Tomorrow is the big day, as we are expecting that they will replace his missing skull piece and insert an internal shunt.

Josh did spend some time with both a speech therapist and physical therapist today. With the speech therapist, he was asked a lot of questions and asked to do a lot of things. When asked if he could say hello, he went with a vulgarity. The therapist said, "OK, I'll take that." He was able to close one eye, give a thumbs up, point to his mom, and give the opposite words for yes, up, mom (he said "Paul"), and short. He was unable to put up three fingers; touch his shoulder, nose, ear, and knee; point to the TV; or give the opposite words for clean or black.  And he has an especially difficult time coming up with words. He couldn't come up with a word for watch or phone and said "photograph" for pen. We have a long way to go in these areas.

His physical therapy went quite well. The last few days it was all we could do to get him to walk one lap around the ICU hallway.  But today, after a quite an effort to wake him up out of a nap, he walked around the ICU loop four times! It was his choice. This was fun to see.

We made some new friends in Denver today. The daughter of a couple in our Portland neighborhood lives here in Denver with her husband and five children. One of her kids was in the same hospital for a surgery today and so she reached out to us to say hello. She visited with Mary for a while earlier in the day and then came back to the hospital with her husband this evening to watch Josh for us for a little while so we could spend a few moments celebrating our anniversary. It was very nice getting to know Tara & Steve Smith. Nice people. We've learned that there are a lot of nice people around.

Just for fun, here is a picture of Josh and Mary: