Sorry for the late update today but it’s a pretty good one. Mackenzie has been up in her chair all day and every time she visits the bathroom we make her take a lap around the ward. We walked three or four laps today and her coarse physical abilities are back to normal. I think her fine motor skills are also back to normal or nearly so.

Finally the feeding tube came out today at about 11 AM or maybe noon. She feels so much better and she’s so much more talkative now that it is gone. She’s had a couple of showers and for the most part she’s able to take care of herself now that the f-ing tube is gone. Her words not mine.

As you might have guessed, her attitude is also returning to normal!

Numbers and some questions still take considerable effort to answer but her sister, Morgan, suggested finding some apps on the iPad that she can practice identifying words, spelling, and pronunciation. I think she really enjoys doing that even when the puzzles are a little tricky. Thank you Morgan, that was a great suggestion!

She has struggled with numbers quite a bit but today she was able to count backwards from 10, which I’m told is a huge step forward. Now we just have to get her to repeat it and make it come back faster and faster each time.

For my own health, I was able to get out this afternoon and find a couple of geocaches on the medical campus here. I found two of them and managed to log 2 1/2 miles of walking/discovery around the campus. I just hope I’m not getting too familiar with this place.

Monday was a really good day for her two weeks ago so we hope that tomorrow she makes tremendous progress and maybe, just maybe we can get out of here and move on to the therapy center at Mercy medical in Cedar Rapids.

Thanks again for all your support and for keeping Mackenzie in your thoughts. Take care.

-Mark