Passed swallow eval now has valve to talk

Brintey did great again with her swallow evaluation and has had the cuff down on her trach so I asked if she could have a valve to give her the chance to start speaking and she just got it. She has seemed like she tried to talk many times over the past few weeks. Her speech therapist said it is common to make some sounds first and then maybe one word sentences. She has already made a lot of sounds since getting it in. She has some gauze n her lower lip that makes hit hard for her to move her lips because her lip is still healing. Her vocal muscles need some exercise and it will take lots of brain coordination to speak more complexly. It will be a process, but we are very excited she is progressing so much. She has been looking around a lot, and smiled again today when we were talking about the kids. She closed her eyes when her therapist asked her to. She has therapy 3X per day (speech, occupational, and physical therapy). The rep from the splinting company came today. Her braces in Tucson got sent back to the home office because they didn't have the right address to ship them to so we lost another week and a half and she has lost some more range of motion in her left arm. She will be getting custom braces on Tuesday or Wednesday. Sorry I haven't posted everyday. I just wanted to keep everyone up to date on any changes and didn't want to bore anyone with more of the same. She has been very comfortable with some periods where her spasms are increasing causing bad pain. These periods are getting less frequent and she is comfortable most of the time. Her nurses are very good at controlling her pain, and we are doing a lot of heat packs and massage. The constant stretches in therapy also keeps her pain down. I'll post again with any changes.
John