Latest update Thursday 12th, : Andrew has had a really good day.

He has managed to stay awake nearly all day, which I attribute to the music which I have put on the CD player kindly donated by Tony - thank you!. He has listened to both Chloe's radio broadcast CDs , the soul CD that Tony bought in and spent ages listening to and reading the cover of the Fiddling Around CD (on which he appears). The putting on of the music has stopped the onset of drowsiness very effectively each time he looks like falling asleep, and he gets really interested in selecting which CD to put on.

The other exciting event was the outing with the occupational therapist to her kitchen. Not only did this take him out of the ward for the first time but he had to perform a task which was:
Make 2 cups of tea and 1 of coffee, all with milk and no sugar. He was shown where the kettle, cups, etc were and left to get on with it. He did very well, apart from forgetting to put any water in the kettle and forgetting to put milk in one of the cups. The tea was even quite drinkable! Nothing was spilt. The main problem was with trying to concentrate and remember what he had to do and where everything was.

The length of his short term memory is approx 5-10 mins. This means that even though he promises faithfully to do something, like stay in bed for 2 hours after his lumbar puncture yesterday, he gets up and walks off after 10 mins because he has forgotten what he was told to do!

Tomorrow gets even more exciting because he has been promised he can wear real clothes and play his guitar when the occupational therapist sees him at 3pm - she wants to see how he gets on. (This clashes with Daves visit - see comment from Kevin - Dave if you see this can you arrange to come after 4pm?). Kev is going to come along and assist musically.

The occupational therapist has advised me to label everything in the house and to create a sort of "this is your life" book, with pictures, dates etc, which brings me onto the next topic: when asked what year it is he usually says a year between 1971 and 1976. He thinks he is is 24 or 19 and when I asked him how old I am he said 21 (!!! - and there is nothing wrong with his eyesight either) . The occupational therapist actually went and got a full length mirror in which he was required to examine himself and see if he really was 24. Each day I have told him it is 2009 and he looks totally amazed, the first two days he sort of went into "could not compute" mode and fell asleep with the effort of trying to understand; though today he did actually manage to remember he was 52 for several hours after he had been told. He still can't recognise a picture of our house, or describe anything about the inside.

However, he recognises nearly all his visitors, no matter how long he has known them.

The other real progress is in the area of reading and writing. He got really interested in a "Songlines" magazine that Tammy brought in tonight, and has spent a considerable amount of time reading it; he is also examining all the signs around the hospital. I have promised to bring in certain CD's that appear in the "Songlines" mag. Today I gave him pen and paper and asked him to write down words that I couldn't hear him say clearly. His writing is fine, spelling OK, but very small. A big leap forward was that tonight he chose what to eat tomorrow from the written menu presented to him. He ticked all the boxes of the things he wanted, reading each item, making up his mind and correctly ticking the boxes in the right way.

His consultant came round this morning said he is making good progress and could go home soon ( this gave me a slight flutter of panic, I was not expecting that I might have to cope with this so quickly). He confessed that Andrew is still a "mystery to him" and that though he has definitely had a stroke, he is still not sure what has caused it, or whether he has had a series of small clots which moved. Tonight I asked if the lumbar puncture test results were available and was told that they were putting them together with other results and to come back again about 5.30 tomorrow night and another MRI was mentioned. The whole mood of the doctors was much more positive today than yesterday. So I don't know whether the mooted operation will be on or not.

Thank you all for the cards, the wheat-free food parcels, the texts and emails, the photos and the music . It is really keeping me going. Andrew is able to read all the cards, no matter how difficult the handwriting. Please keep the photos coming - I have to compile a history of the last 25 years of Andrew ! (does anyone have any expertise in doing such a thing?!). I left the hospital quite early tonight at around 8pm and am hoping for some rest at home.