Day 86 (Nov 16)

Tobias' activity has been slowing down over the last two days and today he was quiet.  He spoke to a few people, but not much and he didn't seem close to speaking with me.  He seemed far away and/or exhausted today.  His heart rate was up and down from a low of 68 to a high of 95, but he mainly hung out in the safe 80s.  Katja wanted to give him a rest day so we didn't pester him with questions or spa treatments to wake him up.  I massaged his neck, arms and feet.  The feet are especially important because they appear to be severely affected by the storming and the lack of motion.  We are worried that he will lose mobility in them and it will only grow harder to restore his flexibility.

Tobias was active for the speech therapist, but was sleepy for the other sessions and he could eat much today.  The speech therapist has been trying to build his swallowing strength.  He attaches two electrodes to the underside of Tobias' jaw on some "anti-swallowing" muscles and applies a small electrical current to them so that they resist the swallowing motion.  The current flows for five seconds every 30 seconds and the speech therapist asks Tobias to swallow when the electrodes are making it harder.  It's a moderately high-tech version of weight lifting for swallowing.  The ST employs a trick to get Tobias to swallow.  He dips a metal spoon in a cup of ice sprinkled with a sour flavored Crystal Light powder and puts it on Tobias' tongue five seconds before the electrodes fire.  The combination of sour and cold apparently induces a swallow.  A few days ago Tobias was able to swallow against the electrical current ten times in thirty minutes.  Today he swallowed against the current 20 times and the current was set at a higher level.  I haven't seen such good results when I'm trying to feed Tobias, but then again I'm not using the metal spoon trick either.

Hope over fear.