Sometimes it's scary to contemplate how a few minutes on a ski hill can change an entire life. Emily is officially scheduled to come home on August 17 - just 7 weeks. When she comes home she's still likely to need a wheelchair, but she will hopefully be able to stand, transfer and maneuver independently. She will not be able to return to school in the Fall. Once she completes her inpatient care she'll have "months" of outpatient therapy. No one will speculate where she'll ultimately end up in 1-2 years. Cogntively - there are still very high hopes. Physically - she may have weakness/limitations on her right side and tremors/control issues on her left side for the rest of her life.

She does have things in her favor - her age and her sex. For reasons no one understands, the female brain tends to recover "better" than the male. The research seems to indicate there is a link between the brain's ability to recover and female hormones. The down side is some of the drugs they could use to help her speed up her brain's processing abilities have only been tested on older boys, so it's really not known if they might interfere with her natural ability to recover. At this point, her doctor is hesitant to prescribe more meds unless she fails to meet certain milestones in the next 1-2 weeks.

There's no dispute that Emily's going to make huge improvements in the next 7 weeks. I'm not sure her doctors/therapists and I are in complete agreement on where she's at today. I see her reacting to my wise cracks in exactly the same way she would have pre-accident. This tells me she's mentally processing pretty normally but she's obviously not where they want her to be on the various tests they give her.

The ENT did his evaluation of Emily's vocal chords today. The good news is that both vocal chords are moving, the left is just slow and not meeting the right. The solution is a collagen injection to help her voice/swallowing while we continue exercises to strengthen her vocal chords. And no, I'm not sure I'm spelling "chord" right - it frankly doesn't look right, but I'm too tired to look it up. Who knows - maybe she'll just wow them when it's easier for her to talk.