Mary gets wheels

Mary has been really tired for the last couple of weeks. This is mainly due to the speaking valve that she has to tolerate for a few hours a day. The valve allows her to make sounds (which for a change she doesn’t seem to do that often) but its main purpose is really to lessen the hole that Mary breathes through in her throat – her tracheostomy. With the valve in, Mary has to breath ‘normally’ through her mouth and nose. She finds this exhausting. A few hours on this normally equals a day of sleeping.

Today though, something interesting happened. Zoe the ward sister decided (somewhat radically) against the speaking valve this morning and Mary became the most animated any of us had seen her for a really long time. She was moving her head from side to side, raising and lowering it when she coughed, and used her eyes to focus on any and every movement and sound in and around the room. Not one bit of shut-eye all day.

Mary was so alert that nurses decided (even on a shorter staffed Sunday!) to move her into a wheelchair so that she could admire the view from her window on this sunny day. To be honest Mary was less enthralled by the site of the Olympics stadium and a clear blue sky and not altogether convinced by the new furniture, but we were over the moon! We didn't attempt any wheelies around the ward but it was great to see Mary out of bed and to recognise how far she has come already.

Mary is going through litres of bio-oil for her many scars at the moment and they too are also testament to how amazingly her body has been healing over the last few days. She can bend her legs and they are continuing to heal which enables her to be moved into the wheelchair by nurses and even other furniture (watch this space?!).

This kind of progress goes to demonstrate how much Mary would benefit from a re-hab placement, but with the shortage in NHS funding and the difficulty in getting insurance to cover the rehab privately at the moment, we continue to bang on lots of people’s doors and make some noise on Mary’s behalf.