Feels so good to laugh.

Late last night Jackie’s Grandma was holding his hand.  She is a retired first grade teacher whose positive outlook on life has allowed her to beat two different cancers and other medical challenges.   She talks to Jackie about all kinds of things, reassuring him that his family is there and tells stories to try to stimulate memories.  At one point Jackie raised his index finger.  She proceeded to hold his finger and sing the song, This Little Light of Mine.  After finishing the song she compared her singing to my ukulele playing and out of nowhere Jackie started laughing with a huge smile on his face.  We all laughed until we cried.  It was a beautiful, heart happy moment!  In Jackie style, an encore was due.  His Grandpa was sitting in a chair fairly close to the bed and he made an adjustment to his hearing aid that made a loud high frequency noise.  Jackie started laughing again.  PTL

The rest of his night went pretty well.  There were several consecutive hours early this morning where he did not stop moving his hands.  I know I said this before, but I truly sense that my Jackie is at some level mentally there, he is just trapped in a body that is going to take a while to work itself back to basic functions.

We continue to slowly increase Jackie’s nutrition through his feeding tube.  We have been here before and are taking it very slow to avoid Jackie getting sick again.

For the first time in 25 days, Jim and I are more than 3 minutes away from him.  We are on the way to tour two accredited TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) Rehab centers in the Philly area.  We have scheduled the tours back to back so we can return to Jackie as soon as possible.  We thought about only one of us going, but this is a big decision and we felt it was best to make it together.  Jackie has one on one nursing today as well as ongoing story telling from Grandma and Grandpa.  Can’t wait until we get back.

Jackie is scheduled for PT/OT today.  ST will resume tomorrow.

Two cool things I wanted to share. Jackie’s friend Sean and his Dad traveled to spring training in FLorida. Yesterday they brought Jackie a sign that had signatures from many of the Phillies. We also received an email from the Flyers with a recorded message of Wayne Simmonds by his locker wishing Jackie a speedy recovery. Jim played it for Jackie last night and he gave the thumbs up to view it a second time. Thanks to everyone who made these things happen!

I’ll have another post tonight with details on the rehab visits and Jackie’s day.  Wanted to send a special thank you to all of our family, who travel back and forth regularly to be there for Jackie and us.  We are blessed.