In much better shape than after the original surgery

This was a big topic of conversation tonight More on that later...

Mom is doing really well. She was moved to a room out of ICU yesterday and is eating regular meals and is recovering quickly. Tamara stayed with her most of the day yesterday and we visited last night and tonight (just after Dad arrived back from Big Spring). They stood her up twice today, as well as continue doing her upper body exercises. A social worker came in this afternoon to arrange physical therapy services back with Vista Ridge, so we believe things are progressing as expected.

She still has the morphine pump, which makes for interesting trips into the time-space continuum. When she's pretty "pumped up," she confuses stories and even the characters involved. It can be pretty entertaining. That didn't happen tonight, but happened several times last night.

Back to the title of this post. We had a long discussion about how poorly Mom was doing last year before surgery. Even the grand-kids commented about how concerned they were following Thanksgiving and Christmas 2007. She seemed to fall asleep at the drop of a hat and couldn't keep up in a conversation without falling asleep, so we don't really know what was going on before the hip replacement last March. All we know is that she is in much better mental and physical shape to come out of this surgery than she was a year ago. We like to contribute that to better medical care than she could was getting, but quite frankly, we really don't know. If you saw her in the first 3 months of 2008 (before the hip surgery), you would be amazed at how much she seems like herself again as opposed to how she was then. She's back to her positive, determined, optimistic ways. She seems determined to get out of the nursing home as soon as possible. We never saw that last year!