This past few weeks have been a steady move forward.  This past week it was all summed up by two therapist working with Matt.  First with speech therapy at Sharpe.  The therapist there has now worked with Matt the past couple of weeks and he said that Matt definitely understands what is going on.  This week Lance, the speech therapist had Matt adding up coins and with simple yes or no answers asked if the totaled a dollar or did this make 50 cents.  Matt got it all right.  He is just unable to express what he is thinking like you or I.  That has to be frustrating but he said it is our job to help him and bring it out.  Sharpe continues to give us exercises to keep Matt moving along that path.  Last night Lindsey was over and Lisa and I had just got Matt down off the standing frame, Matt was a little tired, he had been up for about an hour.  I was in my office, Lindsey was sitting with Matt.  Lisa and Joan were in the room with Lindsey.  They said as Matt was watching Lindsey he lunged forward from an reclined position to a fully seated position with both arms out reaching out to Lindsey and stared right at her!  Lindsey, Lisa and Joan were watching in surprise and didn’t know what to do.  Matt just sat there with both arms out, Lindsey said she asked him what?  They got him calmed down and he laid back after a while.  Today Spencer came in for a few hours and when I told him what had happened the past week Spencer went right after Matt with some cognitive tests.  He pulled up a table and got out a deck of cards.  He had Matt pull cards from his hand as he was asked.  Matt pulled out the black jack.  Then an ace. Then Spencer held out two jacks and an ace and asked Matt to pull up the red jack then what two cards that would make 21 or black jack.  Matt first pulled the jack, then went back and pulled the ace.  All this while he was sitting straight up holding his head which is still really hard for him for more than 20 minutes at a time.  This all took Matt a while to do, the whole thing went on for about 45 minutes or so and we could both see he was exhausted.  Spencer said basically the same thing, it’s all there it’s just the expression that Matt needs to work on.   Matt also had an eval with his eye doctor and she is contacting Spencer and wants to speak with Lance the speech therapist so they can all coordinate therapies especially now that Matt can do things and the cognition is one of the main focuses everyone is working on.  This next week Matt will go in for the first in a series of four evaluations at SDSU.  There program should go on through the spring and summer months so that should be exciting.  We will keep you posted.

Thanks 

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