Home Sweet Home

Dom walked out of the Sunshine Hospital at 11am on July 17; 23 days after having a stroke, 25 days after having emergency surgery.  23 days prior I worried about how I would get him home from RMH (thinking he’d hurt his back – nothing else).  25 days prior I thought I’d lose him forever…but here he was, sitting on the couch with me in our lounge room!  This was strange.  It was the first time in just over 3 weeks that I was able to sit and not have to worry about what traffic would be like getting to the hospital, did I have everything packed that Dom needed and requested, did I feed the dog and would he be ok being left alone again.  But Dom was home…more tears – happy ones this time! 

Home is where the heart is :-)

Now our focus turned to more extensive rehabilitation.  We didn’t want to lose what he had achieved at Sunshine, we wanted to build on it.  The first week of Dom being home were fairly quiet and it was nice to settle into a new kind of routine.  We were worried Dom would get bored, frustrated and without having external things to contribute to that he would become depressed.  So we came up with a list of ‘things’ for him to do when he was sick of watching TV.  He could play his guitar again, play his PlayStation, watch YouTube…we only came up with a small list and were thankful we had Foxtel. 

There were lots of things to organise now Dom was home….GP appointments, filling prescriptions, blood tests, finance management and decisions to be made.  I changed my work schedule to only going in to teach my classes, so I could come home to Dom during my free sessions. He was still getting used to the amount of concentration he needed to pay to simple everyday tasks, like getting his breakfast.  But he faced it one day at a time and set himself small goals to work towards each day. 

Dom threw himself into physical therapy.  He did two sessions a day in our home gym working on building his core strength and gaining back the muscle mass he lost during his hospital stay.  He still had weakness in the right side of his body compared to the left.  He had full movement but not the strength so he worked on increasing it while on the waiting list for outpatient rehab at our local hospital. 

Dom had lots of visitors during his first couple of weeks home and this motivated him to continue to improve, it was uplifting to have people come and visit and remark how much they couldn’t believe Dom had had a stroke a month ago…he looked so good and was so much like his old self, it was remarkable. 

Dom was so positive about his rehabilitation – he couldn’t wait to get into the outpatient program to further the progress he was making.