Lets hear it for the girl..

Merrily passed the first of a number of skills tests she will have to perform to get her CDL license and graduate from the truck driving school.

Before any driver gets into a truck and drives off, a pre Trip Inspection (PTI) of the vehicle must be done. This consists of visually and mechanically inspecting and challenging 100 specific points of the truck.

Some examples are:

1. check to see that there is no more than 1” of movement in each brake slack adjuster.
2. Make sure that none of the springs are loose or broken.
3. Make sure that tire pressures are all correct.

Etc… for 97 more things.

The last few PTI items are done in the cab of the truck. Merrily got 99 of the 100 correct. These checks must all be done from memory, too. She only missed 1 thing…… she was sitting in the cab with her hands on the steering wheel at the end and still had about 3 minutes do go to complete the PTI test.(You only have 20 minutes to do it in).

She felt she was forgetting one thing but just could not think of what it was. She turns to the instructor and said that she was finished.

He said she missed one. She said “which one?”

He says “Steering Wheel Check!”

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SEIZURE!

68 days…. Not better than the record 100 days but still much better  than the typical 14 days between them she has experienced most of her 4 year life.  Katie had one this morning about 10am.

I really hate it for her when they happen but thankfully the meds are working and the seizures that she does have are wayyyy  less intense and last only a few minutes instead of hours.

None of us slept particularly well overnight. I usually blame on a full moon because that is typically when I don’t sleep too soundly.

Looking back, Katie has had a few small cues that she might have been working up to a seizure. Little things, like a sudden involuntary flash-kick of a hind leg while she is resting or some pacing for no apparent reason.

She is fine, though.  it lasted about 4 minutes and then she was off walking it off. She seems to have discovered that walking around helps clear it out of her system and I can believe that. The normal Cross-crawl patterning that takes place in the nervous system when walking on 4 legs, is a powerful normalizer for the whole neurological system. 

Therapeutically, cross-crawl simulation, even while lying down, is used to stabilize unbalanced muscle tone and works for all 3 axis of the body (front/back, side/side, top/bottom).

I have not seen anything specific about its use in humans in seizure recovery but from what I have seen in Katie, it definitely shortens the number of bouts of rigor that she typically has (3 –6 per seizure to just 1 or two). It also seems to bring the slobbering and glassy eyed stark staring to an end much more quickly than if she does not walk.

Back when she was having them several times a month, I found that even if I carried her outside on a leash and helped support her while she tried to walk, she would return to normal much more quickly. You could just watch how her walking around went from that of a drunken sailor to a normal dog in a matter of minutes while she was walking, even just doing figure 8’s.

Although this day started off with a few minutes of angst it has turned out nicely.  Though a little cooler in the 50s today, it was still very nice to take a few walks and enjoy the filtered sunlight through the spring trees and a few clouds.

Maybe tonight will be a sound night of sleep for everyone.  Merrily is driving on the road tomorrow and is nailing the shifting so I can hardly wait unti we can climb into Clifford and share the drive to wherever we want.

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Merrily got to drive a Volvo today

Yep.,, and she liked it better than any of the other trucks she has driven (Freightliners and Macks). She had a good day, drove for an hour and even crossed a DOT scale (big deal?) and came home still positive but tired.

Tomorrow is just an all classroom day except for a few demos of the new field exercises to be done starting on Friday. 

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Tuesday’s Child is full of grace

Yep, that about sums up Merrily. Today was a great day for her. Most of the day was on the practice field and her backing problems have been overwhelmed by her persistence and she did GREAT! 

She came home for lunch and when she called to let me know she was just leaving I could tell from the crystal sparkle in her voice that today was going very well for her.

Things had not changed by dinner time, either.  She was still up and feeling in control again.  This is wonderful for me to watch because having been there, I think that she is actually doing better than I was at this point in the class. I know she does not see it that way but all the evidence says that she is nailing it!

Another beautiful but chilly day. Tomorrow promises some rain but so far, nada, so maybe it won’t be so bad.

She is driving on the road tomorrow, so I am anxious to see if her problems with downshifting have gotten any less, too. She was really frustrated all weekend about her difficulties with downshifting and Skip shifting on a down shift.

The good news is that she will be driving a Volvo but it’s a 10 speed and she feels like a 9 speed is easier for her to handle. maybe this will show her that it was the 10 speed transmissions in the Freightliner trucks that was the problem.

Anyhoo, she is sleeping right now because she will be gone all day tomorrow (7 hours out on the road).

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Have a nice day…. thanks, I just did!

Sundays seem to always be an awkward day for me. The whole “is it the first day of the week… or the last?” thing kind of keeps me a little uncommitted as to just what to do on a Sunday.

Tomorrow Merrily starts week 3 of 8 of truck driver training. She is struggling more with learning to back a 40’ trailer than what she thinks is normal.  Actually, that is the toughest of the field exercises that they do.  They intentionally have sloppy hitches between the trailers and the trucks so that it is impossible to just hold the steering wheel in one position and have the trailer move in a constant line.  It wanders all over the place forcing the driver to keep correcting it in real time…. not easy.

She is doing very well in all other areas, though. Getting good scores on the written tests and on all the other field exercises she is getting them down pat.

However, tomorrow, they are stepping up the difficulty of the exercises so they will be even more challenging.  She is not looking forward to that.

Her shifting is getting better, too.  Last week, they introduced skip shifting (where you skip one or two gears at one shift point) and she even got that one pretty well.  I never got that one very well at all. I am really glad that Clifford has an Autoshift transmission so it knows how to do it without grinding the gears.

Our Autoshift truck has a standard 10 speed transmission but the computer controls the actual gear selection and synchronizing so the driver just has to pay attention to the road and the truck takes care of the rest and does not have a stick to shift gears.

As for the rest of today, we walked Katie a few times (she is on day 61 of no seizures, wahoo!) , read the Sunday paper (Merrily’s job- I am not a newspaper reader) and swapped out the empty propane tank with the full one that Emery brought down.

We knew from late last week that Emery and Christi would probably come down today and that was a good thing to look forward to. Merrily even said yesterday that she was missing “the kids” and I will admit that I think of them most every day at least once. Having them come for dinner at Cracker Barrel was really a very good thing on several levels.

Merrily was doing a lot better after dinner. I think she just really needed to see her “kids” even if they are pushing 30. Okay, Okay, so maybe I was really missing them, too.

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