Just ten days more.

Ten days until we fly out of Oklahoma. We're ready to begin the countdown. Not much happening right now except last minute shopping, laundry and dry cleaning to get ready for the trip.

As a side note, Eddie and I drove to the OKC MDA Clinic for his semi-annual check up last week. The Clinic is awesome. They treat him very well. I told him that a bride doesn't get that much attention on her wedding day. He doesn't just get his 15 minutes of fame, but an hour or so with several different specialists.

I'd inquired about a piece of equipment called a "cough assist". Eddie doesn't have problems eating food, but gets choked occassionally on liquids, and he doesn't cough with enough force to catch his breath and clear his throat. The clinic is sending an inhalation therapist to the house (possibly before our trip) to fit him with the cough assist, and a Bi-pap machine (excuse the spelling, here at our house, I'm not the one with the medical training). That's the equipment for night time use of people with sleep apnea. Eddie doesn't have apnea, but the dr. thinks it will be of benefit since his lung strength has decreased since the last check up.

I also inquired about a text-to-speech device since it's getting more difficult to understand his speech patterns. We have an appointment with a speech pathologist this week to see what they recommend. The inhalation therapist will come to the house, but there are (apparently) many different devices on the market for speech augmentation, and they can't haul them all over here... thus we go to them. The speech pathologist will evaluate his current needs and anticipate his future needs, then make a recommendation on what will work best for him. The technology for these devices is so advanced that it's amazing.

That's all for now. I'll check in before we leave on Oct. 16th!