They say, “No news is good news,” which is pretty ambiguous if you think about it, and inaccurate because right now it feels like, actually, all news is good news.

Yes, Tanja had a period of low blood pressure this morning which led to her feeling out of sorts for a bit, but the medicos put her into compression stockings and gaver her a kind of tight, white cummerbund and soon she was back in business.

Just in time too because her schedule was demanding today. It is as if, with the news of her early release leaking out, the therapists were anxious to get their licks in while they could. The morning was filled with OT, PT and a thing called Recreational Therapy (where they quiz you about what you do for fun and then give you exercises designed to show you how difficult your favorite things will be for a while).

For lunch it was a ham sandwich, which looked fine, and some broccoli prepared as if to punish Tanja for complaining about the veggies.

Then starting at 1:00, the various therapies began again, keeping her busy, with an hours rest in the middle, until five when her home team arrived with an Incredibowl from Rabbit’s Cafe–a delicious mixture of kale and broccoli, but really tasty broccoli redolent of sesame oil, and brown rice and savory soy curls in a peanut sauce with a garnish of pickled red onion.

The tingling, which Tanja described as feeling like your arm had fallen asleep, but the deepest, most troubled sleep ever, and which used to extend from shoulder to finger tip, has now receded so that it is nearly gone from her left side entirely and is confined on the right to just her hand. Meanwhile her grip on the right continues to strengthen, while the left lags a little. It gives her a bit of a superhero feeling to me, Iron Woman maybe–equipped with one super-sensitive appendage and one super powerful one.

Early on in this journey, I kept careful notes of all the things the doctors said with the idea that, in my downtime, I would look these things up, educate myself and be the best advocate I could be for Tanja. But the very first time I went to the Internet to research a phrase I’d caught, the description presented was so overwhelmingly varied, with rapidly branching if/then diagnostic paths, each one accompanied by what I assume were worst case outcomes, described in terms that were not well known to me but which suggested tremendous difficulties of every sort imaginable–I simply closed my laptop and decided my optimism would be more valuable than any medical training I might pick up at this late date.

That said, Spinal Shock Syndrome has come up a couple of times and it comes up here now because it helps give a little bit of context to her healing. Again, if you look up Spinal Shock Syndrome, it will lead you down a rabbit hole. But the super-dumbed-down soundbite that several of the PT professionals have shared with Tanja amounts to this: you can expect to see a period of relatively rapid improvement for three to six weeks after an injury as some aspects of Spinal Shock, like inflammation, subside. Tanja’s improvement has been surprisingly rapid. The speed and extent of this improvement plus the fact that we haven’t even hit the three-week mark yet is a really good harbinger of continued rapid improvement over the next few weeks.

If you consider what she was able to do two weeks ago, one week ago and then today, and you extrapolate that improvement over time, the calculation indicates that she will be capable of unaided flight by Christmas. She could conceivably relieve Rudolph in a pinch.

However, the experience of the PTs suggest that she might see continued improvement over the next few weeks, slower but still important progress over the first three months, perhaps something of a plateau at that point, and then continued progress to the twelve month mark.

It’s all super speculative but the thing we are focused on now is the immediate future and setting her up for her best recovery.

I had the good fortune years ago, when working on a bit of documentary content, to spend a couple weeks holed up in the basement of a major NBA star who was making a title run. It was like being a termite–we could do our work as long as no one noticed us. But what was interesting was that this guy did essentially two things the whole time we watched him. He kicked ass on the basketball court. And he lay immobile on the couch with a fuzzy blanket over his ridiculously long legs. Yes, there was some travel back and forth. But other than that he was either demolishing or resting. I’ve never seen someone rest that much. It was inspiring.

And that’s what’s next for Tanja!

Here’s the badass hype-song that superstar played in his car on the way to games.