It is just after 7 pm. Tanja has had a tasty looking dinner of spaghetti w/ pesto and is settling in for the night after a big day of hard work.

Two weeks ago at this time she would’ve been sitting with her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law, her son and her husband on the second floor of her mother’s house watching a youtube video of a baroque quintet busting out some Bach. Her husband is anxiously awaiting the moment he can get her alone to discuss the expression of obsequious rapture that consumes the face of the oboist as he transmits this music through his instrument. That conversation will be put on hold.

She grew up in this house and she has gone down those stairs, what? Tens of thousands of times. The vast majority of times it went just fine. One time it didn’t.

At 7 pm on March 3rd, if you’d told me we’d be here, I would’ve recoiled in fear. At 7:30, if you could’ve somehow whispered in my ear that we would be here, I would have wept for joy.

She is doing so well!

She went through two rounds of PT and OT today. She worked on stairs. She walked outside. She held a tray and tried to keep a ball balanced on it. At lunch, she reached over and took an apple slice and ate it.

I know these are little things and, when you’ve got all four limbs working away, it may be horrifying to imagine not being able to lift an apple slice. But these are the incremental steps toward recovery that, early on, all the caregivers could only suggest might come to pass.

Now, her PT and OT people are talking to her in vastly more positive terms.

So, lots and lots of hope for more improvement. And a new, powerful gratitude for everything we have right now.

Tanja is exhausted at the end of the day. She misses her home.

But our last nurse at OHSU, the one who helped us pack up in such a hurry, told us she had hiked the Appalachian Trail. Which prompted me to say to Tanja, “You’re hiking the AT right now. It’s hard work. It tires you out. But every day you are that much closer to home. “

“I’ll buy that,” she said. “I’m a baby hiking the A.T.”

“I don’t know if they work together like that.”

“I think they do.”

“Ok. So do I.”