Long Overdue Updates
For anyone who had been reading this blog, I’m addressing this to you and new readers as well. To make matters short, I’ve been fully recovered from my health issues this year. It still amazes me what it took to get from Point A to Point B and all the people involved. As part of this everyone should know that I’ve actually been back at work since the end of April when my radiation therapy was finished. Shortly thereafter I was admitted to the Center for Transitional Neurorehabilitation for evaluation for their program. What a difficult and amazing process that was. Very self-revealing too. I worked with several different facets and therapists each dedicated to their own specialties in identifying areas where in my humble unprofessional opinion the average non-neurologically-compromised individual could benefit and improve. Here’s where the rubber met the road:
- Neuropsychology - (To check my mood during my treatment. I think I did okay with this as it was but it’s part of the program for just about everyone)
- Occupational Therapy (To be sure my day-to-day activities and responsiblities could be maximized and potential compensations for any supposed or indentified deficiencies be brought forth)
- Physical Therapy (To be sure my energy level and my body was performing as normally as possible)
- Speech and Language Therapy (To help in areas related to visual scanning, language processing, and deductive reasoning) In actuality my OT and SLT sessions sometimes overlapped and my therapists threw several curve balls my way to be sure I could reach my fullest potential. As self-revealing as that was, it was very effective
There were other experiences that led up to this point in time, but suffice it to say, I’ve been performing well. My supervisor and co-workers have been very supportive. My clientele routinely tell me they can’t tell me any difference in my personality. That’s an inside-the-box, vs. outside-the-box perspective issue. The charts and graphs of my cognitive rehabilitation exercises show that considerable progress was made. In order to justify considerable, the tasks that patients in this program all go through include doing paper-pencil exercises and other tasks that stretch and bend your mind so that new neural pathways can be made and if not, what compensations could be made.
As part of all this, one of my new side-projects I’m taking on is to take some of the assessment tools and exercises I was given as paper-pencil tests and try to digitize them into programs that anyone can do online at home. My platform of choice is likely going to be Adobe Flex/AIR as that is what I’m most familiar with. I’ll keep everyone updated as I progress.
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