Dave’s MS Blog

Friday, August 31, 2007 - Partial Day of Rest

September 1st, 2007

This was officially to be a day of rest for Dave and the day began that way. However, we have now completely run out of our ‘provisions’ that we brought from home (we had one granola bar left that we split for our breakfast and if need be, we have six packets of ketchup that I can convert into tomato soup). We decided to venture out to a new supermarket. We were confident we could make this trip by ourselves. Things went pretty well until time to purchase our items. A large sign at the cash registers, printed all in English said “We accept the following credit cards - MasterCard, Visa, American Express”. Wanting to save our remaining Chinese money for the taxi ride to the airport on Monday, we thought we’d pay with our Visa card. WRONG! They only accept Chinese credit cards. Why would the sign be printed in English and why were the credit card names in English? There was not a single employee who could speak English, but they were all very good at shaking their heads no. I guess we still have a bit of a language barrier when we don’t have a Chinese speaking friend with us! We also had to buy Dave a new electric razor because we burned his up by forgetting to plug it into the converter - that was our only electric catastrophe and Dave saw the smoke before our smoke detector went off so at least we didn’t create a panic here at the hospital.

The afternoon was spent resting until Mrs. Martin decided that the new stem cells were still in training and needed their physical workout…regardless of Dave’s day of rest. We went through Dave’s whole physical therapy program in faster than normal time. Even though he might not realize it, his muscles are getting stronger, a long with an improvement in his balance. I can actually see a little muscle forming in Dave’s right calf where the muscle was atrophed. Before leaving here I will have to consult with Martin as to when to increase the weights and repetitions without causing harm to Dave’s muscles.

Pictures today include Dave with Dr. Mike, Martin doing a moxie treatment on himself for a bad stomach and a few pictures taken here in the hospital…our home, sweet home for the past few weeks.