Good news and... more good news

The survey arrived this morning from David Dabney. The boat is fine and nothing much is wrong, which is nice. There are a few things like gas pipes which we probably need to change, he wasn't very happy with the arrangement under the galley sink, and he apparently failed to find our Fortress anchor which is a little worrying. On the other hand he has checked lots of things which were on our checklist so should save us time.

I was so absorbed in the survey that when our carer arrived to give Sam a shower I totally forgot to provide any clothes until she came to remind me. Sam has one more care visit on Friday, and that will be the last one. He still needs a little bit of help in the bathroom but it seems silly to pay for half an hour of carer's time when he only needs five minutes of help.

Today also saw Sam's pre-discharge meeting from Icanho. I have been slightly dreading this as we know several stroke survivors who have been told by Icanho at this stage "don't expect to see any further improvement".  However, that wasn't the message today. Sesa, Sam's physio, wants to see him again after the sailing trip as she anticipates it may have a good impact on his mobility. She has just completed a batch of tests on Sam. On his balance he has improved from a score of 14 in September to 45 now, not far from the adult norm which is 56, and also above the threshold (43) where falls are considered a serious problem. On mobility he is at 14, which is halfway to the full score of 28, but when tested in September he was at 2, so it's a huge improvement. Neither his leg nor his arm are actually moving much better than when he started at Icanho, and Sesa said all his improvements are down to Sam's sheer determination and to my support, which was nice. 

Speech is harder to measure and obviously all language is still affected, but Sesa also said she had observed how much better Sam is at understanding and responding to commands and generally engaging with life. We discussed in the car on the way to the meeting that once we are on the boat Sam needs to take responsibility for some specific things, which will be good for him and also of course for me.

We finally have almost all the stuff we ordered from numerous chandleries and the heap in my office is starting to migrate to the living room. We'll probably spend the weekend doing trial loads of the car and then quite possibly going out to buy a rooftop luggage box....