I saw Chris on Monday for his assessment by his new private PT Lisa and I am happy to say she seems really fantastic, very experienced and from what I am told, highly respected in the industry with loads of experience with severe brain injury. It was a long 90 minute assessment and we did not have had the chance to catch up properly on next steps/ recommendations yet. His new private SALT Trudi is out on vacation this week so I hope next week onwards I will have an action plan in place for Chris. The idea is to hire assistants that will be guided and trained by the therapists, and these assistants will be carrying it out on a day to day basis with periodic supervision. This makes most sense as changes are slow and lots of repetitive practice is required. I will recruit the assistants from Chris' old floor where there is an abundance of absolutely motivated fantastic caring staff who knows Chris well and would likely to be delighted at working with him…

After the PT assessment, I had the opportunity to also sit down with the team from the Jacob to coordinate and discuss various issues, i.e. their work with Chris and how to coordinate with the new therapists, communication (or lack thereof) issues, and how to work going forward. I think it was good to seat down as lack of frequent dialogue generates too many questions. My message was very clear: I am not giving up on Chris and I DO expect people who work with him to fully engage and also to be open minded about going the extra mile for Chris. I honestly do not care what the other statistics and experiences with brain injury had been, Chris right now has a couple of million stem cells floating around his brain and I want to give it the best shot at least for the next few months. I think it was a helpful overdue catch up. I fundamentally believe Chris gets amazing, above par care at the Jacob and I have always always been full of praise for the team.

But nothing is perfect. I think generally people have no problems when I express positive opinions and/or I am on a great happy hopeful mood. But sometimes, people get concerned about negative opinions and/or when I am having an angry pissed off time. At the end of the day, they are my opinions (and my emotions). I am happy if people are happy with what I write, but if people are not and disagree, they are entitled to. I write what I think, maybe too much of it, but that is me and I will continue to write exactly what I think of everything - not to please anyone. I am the first one to reckon I am really nasty when I get too angry, thruth be told, I am not nice when I am pissed off.

On a final topic, I got a great suggestion from one of the many people in the brain injury community regarding Chris' choices when he is asked "Which T-shirt you want to wear today?". S (from CA, USA) said she used this technique with her husband when he was also recovering from a brain injury. It was a suggestion to use T-shirts that could trigger significant memories from the past, this makes a lot of sense given Chris' past track record of being a star athlete and heavily involved in sports. I have asked Chris' friend Fabio (who will be in town early July) to get me a couple of T-shirts from University of Albany's athletics, basketball team, etc. I have no idea where to get stuff from his high school, but if anyone out there, specially from Chris' high school and Chris childhood has any ideas of themed T-shirt that could be meaningful to Chris and/or part of his past as an athlete/ student, I think it could be helpful. The size has to be X-Large or XX-Large as it needs to be wide to comfortably manoeuvre around his arms. Please email me at koo_cho@hotmail.com for the mailing address.

Chris was good yesterday, smiley, and alert. He was also part of the meeting following his assessment, I left him around lunch time to rush back to work. My parents and I did not go to the hospital over the weekend, instead I went to the park both Saturday and Sunday with Gabriel and friends, did yoga, rested, etc. It was fantastic to have a full weekend off.