Hello and Happy New Year!

I'm finally taking a minute to write and catch up. It seems to be just as busy after Christmas as it was before. Joe is slowly slowly doing a little better each day. The doctor said that improvement would kind of taper off and that seems to be the case. Yet when we were at church last week, I noticed how much better he was than the week before (he goes for just one hour and then goes home to rest). And the week before that he went for the first time and barely barely made it through. So it WAS uplifting to see that he actually had improved compared to the weeks before. The usual day for him is to get up and have breakfast, take a shower, rest, work with the physical therapist, rest, work with the occupational therapist, rest, have some lunch, rest, listen to a little of his books on tape (while he rests), eat dinner, rest, go to bed. He absolutely hates to ride in the car as his headaches are still pretty severe and any bump in the road is excruciating. We did make a big excursion to the DMV to get the handicap sticker, but have yet to use it (wait we did at church yesterday!!). Hopefully that will start to improve so we can get him out of the house some. He is still trying this new medicine at night, and the doc raised the dosage, but results won't be obvious for about a month he said. Patience is the key I guess.

Another worry is that his double vision has not improved. The doc said that may not be connected to the actualy dissection of the artery and may be something else entirely associated with the stroke. That has us worried! We have an appointment with the opthamologist on Thursday....we'll see what that entails.

Meanwhile, I wonder just how much of all this will stay with him and whether he will ever be the way he was. I shouldn't worry about that but I do. But thanks to prayers and food and love and kindness we are getting through it just fine!

Love to you all, a million million thanks!
Rebecca