Right Forearm Makes Its Debut

Time is relentless. I can hardly believe it, but a month has passed since my last PT re-evaluation; two months have passed since my last ASIA exam. Thus, today's PT session was spent doing a 30-day re-eval and 60-day ASIA re-exam.

Over all, therapy is going remarkably well. It seems that I'm recovering more function all the time. If only someone had told me years ago that the secret to recovery is slapping on some electrodes and sending electric pulses through my body! (Ok, so that's an arrant oversimplification, but you get my point.) I try not to dwell too much on "What If"; however, I can't help but wonder what a difference this would've made in my life had I known about it years ago.

I've recovered quite a lot of sensation down both of my arms – so much that a couple of spots during today's ASIA exam actually surprised me with how vivid the sensation was. Some spots are still impaired, but much less so.

What's more interesting to me is what I've been feeling in my arms beneath the skin.

Over the past few months, I've noticed a change – more drastic, more significant, in my right arm, but substantial in both – in what I can feel inside, and what I can "move". (Move, here, is something of a relative term – although it is not something you'd be able to see, I am able to flex/contract, or 'move', different muscles in my forearms.)

Before, it was nothing. Well, something – a sense of existence, but more an aesthesis. When I would try to move my fingers, for example, the sensation in my arm, instead of continuing down into my hand, dissolved into the ether just below my elbow. When I wasn't looking, and someone moved my hand, I couldn't tell you how or where they'd moved it (that's proprioception, and mine, for the most part, is lousy below the elbows).

Now, when I try to move my fingers (in either hand), it's much different – there is a subtle, yet distinct, shifting. I can feel the muscles down the outside of my arm tense when I try to lift my pinky away from the rest of my hand. The muscles down the back of my forearm strain when I try to bend my wrist back. Although my fingers, wrists, and hands don't move appreciably during these attempts, I can feel taught strings pulling brightly inside the murky recesses of my forearms.

It's a long ride from Olney to Baltimore – about an hour and 20 minutes without traffic (but there's always traffic). During the 3 or so hours I spend in the van each day I go for therapy, I move things. I concentrate on different areas and try to move. Cara, always with the fantastically useful advice, suggested I look up pictures of muscles in my arms so I can better visualize what I'm trying, or succeeding, to move. That has helped quite a lot.

Last month, during my re-eval, I told Cara I could flex the muscles in my forearm. Though I could tell her which ones I felt working for whichever movement I was trying to accomplish, and they were the correct muscles, Cara could not feel them. After a month's worth of flex-filled commute time and therapy, this month Cara could feel them in my right arm, and actually see them in my left arm.

Now that a neural connection between my brain and my arm muscles has been established (or, more accurately, re-established), the next order of business is to build up and strengthen my muscles – which are, after 17 years of disuse, quite frankly, wasted.