January 25th, 2011 by Conor

I should be working on my post from yesterday, telling you all about how great it is that everyone has showed up to support danny. I have it started and might even finish it later, but i know you already know these things and for now I’ve been spending a lot of time in Dannys room today just trying to be a positive energy in the room and to try and help lighten the mood a little bit, (go figure right). Even though you can tell that Danny is frustrated with himself he needs to realize that every little thing that he is doing is way beyond anything that I personally expected from him at this point. I thought that I was amazed when i first saw him last night when he was making me laugh via laptop typing. Now, today he has already been out of his bed taking a walk down the hall, sitting up in a chair out of the bed, and taking all sorts of quizzes and tests to establish areas of his brain that need more work than others. Of course he is frustrated, he is struggling at tasks that were mindless to him three weeks ago. Watching him give his all at everything he does makes you realize just how much we all take for granted in our lives.

Take a second and think about your everyday life. You wake up and get out of bed. Stop. You can’t get out of bed because you can’t get up on your own, and even if you do, you cant keep your balance enough to stay standing on your own. Balance for Danny was one of many of his strong points and now he has to start from scratch. The frustration must be tremendous.

Now back to your every day life. So you’ve made it out of your bed except you’re on the floor now because you couldn’t keep your balance. What do you do? Call for help, right? Wrong. You no longer have the ability to speak. The simple act that we all learn at an age most don’t even remember. Danny can no longer communicate vocally. Anything Danny wants to communicate needs to be written or typed down if hand gestures or facial expressions don’t suffice.

These are just two examples of the dozen I have had to witness Danny struggle with just in the past 45 minutes. It is difficult to have to sit and watch your friend struggle with “the simple things in life”.

Even without the tests and moving around, just the sounds of the machines helping keep Danny stable are enough to make you go insane. The tubes and wires have been cut back now since I’ve been here, but there are still much more than I would care to deal with. Every couple of minutes another beeper is going off or another dressing needs to be changed. All Danny wants to do is rest and as soon as he gets a chance another ringer goes off and a bad IV needs to be replaced, (this specific example is happening right now in front of my eyes).

Anyways, i am sure you all must be overwhelmed by the amounts of posts being put up today. I know personally mine must have given a few people a headache by the end. Ill try to keep them shorter. There are a lot of us here now and for the sake of not repeating everyone else I’ll try to tone it down. For now we are all trying to solve the mystery of the missing nose ring. Stayed in for the first two surgeries but is nowhere to be found after the third and even the surgeon who performed the operation was baffled by it’s disappearance. I vote we save a few staples and make a set for him when he gets out of here. Even with all that is going on it is very noticeable that it is missing.

Final note before I’m out, even though I realize you all know the catheter is out but I wasn’t sure if you were aware that this topic was about 80% of Danny’s conversations. I’m extremely excited to find out what we get to talk about now!

Goodnight Danny…get some rest for me and whatever you do…don’t pee the bed!

-TommyJ