ironymaiden | where my love lies waiting

i am home and back at my first real day of work. it's all very normal and very alien all at once.

Dad is progressing. his aphasia diagnosis is official, and as far as i'm concerned that's hopeful - he needs to work on getting his words out, but behind that barrier he is very much himself. to his limited ability, he's been friendly with the staff and making jokes. i know it will be a long road, but he is so game and so patient and so determined.

we still don't know why his symptoms wax and wane. sometimes he can't move his right extremities at all, sometimes they're just weaker than the left. when he's tired his speech is soft and slurred, and he might only be able to manage yeses and nos. there's no way to measure if it's seizure activity because his scalp is still too delicate for EEG. but the expression is consistent with left-side brain damage and that is where the tumors were. from discussion with mom, i think some of this was coming on before the surgery. being optimistic, i can see how having the tumors out and doing intensive rehab could get him back to pre-surgery baseline and maybe better.

the last thing i did before i left the hospital was to ask him to sing with me. (i suspected from previous reading that he would be able to sing more fluently than speak.) he led as we sang the song he used to sing to put me to sleep:
Sixteen Tons.*

we made his nurse cry.

*Dad sang weirdly inappropriate material to and with me when i was a child. i bought a handful of mp3s for songs we used to sing together and sent them to mom to try getting him to sing along, part Kenny Rogers and part Peter Paul & Mary. Kenny Rogers songs we used to sing together included a wife cheating on her disabled veteran husband, rape and revenge killing, a man riding in a train car with a dead body, and an ex-husband berating his unfaithful wife in public.