Therapy & Injections - June 29, 2011

Our van picked us up at 10:30am to go to BioFit.  At the BioFit waiting room we met another stem cell spinal cord injury patient.  He was injured at his T6 / T7 in a rodeo 6 years ago.  Three years ago he received a single stem cell injection in Mexico and did gain some improvement.

Eric's therapy began with stretching and range of motion with his legs.  Here are pictures of the daily stretches.

 

 

After stretching it was time for 200 crunches.  We were both pretty tired today from not sleeping well and I do situps along with Eric so we both kind of groaned when we started.

Today's exercises were focused on shoulder workouts.  First was a single arm shoulder press with the added bonus of sticking the other arm straight out holding a weight.  Brutal!  Then Eric held a weight with two hands and rotated it around his head in both directions.  He did three sets of those.  

Next was fun exercises that still worked the shoulders.  First he  bounced a huge ball on each side lifting it over his head for transfer to the other side.  That was followed by a game of volley the medicine ball with Alexis. The ball was aimed head high and over each shoulder.

A little after noon we left in our van heading back to the hotel and on our way we got stuck in a traffic jam. Since we were supposed to be picked back up at 1pm for a 1:30pm injections, we were eventually rerouted to go directly to the Stem Cell Institute.  We got there early so we had to wait a long time.  Because we had not gotten to go back to the hotel, we did not have books for the wait and Tracy did not get to grab a jacket which is needed for the ice cold air conditioned facility.  Eventually Eric got brought back into the small clean room for his spinal injection.  Then suddenly there was a huge boom of thunder.  The sky opened up and it down poured rain flooding streets outside and continued to thunder and lightening.  Eric's spinal and IV injections went smoothly.  This is his first of two bone marrow stem cell injections.  

Because of the flooding and increased traffic, we had to wait even longer to get our ride home.  We eventually got back at 3:45pm starving from lack of lunch!  We debated going straight to dinner but decided to go eat snacks in the room so Eric could lie down and we will go eat dinner later.