October 13

I've had a lot of people tell me they've had dreams about me walking over the past year. I've kept a list in my phone just to keep track of it all. The messages I get from people about their dreams have been hilarious. I wrote about it a few months ago, but my favorite is the dream Molly and I had. When I was in the ICU, I woke up and Mom told me that I had to get into that stupid chair they made me get out of bed and sit in. It was back when I had absolutely no core strength or movement, so doing anything but laying in bed took a lot of my energy.  It was back when anything I did besides laying in bed was "the hardest thing I've ever done." Breathing, sitting up,  and feeding myself were all dreaded tasks. I know, something that sounds so simple and common was something I struggled with every single day. Anyways, I told Mom (more like "mouthed" it since I still hadn't regained my voice) that I wasn't getting in that chair because I was exhausted. I said I had walked around the nurses station all night with Molly and I didn't want to do anything but sleep more. She laughed and asked me what in the world I was talking about and I explained "Molly and I walked around, laughing and talking all night about how we should go back to school for physical therapy instead of optometry because they barely have to do anything." I know now that this isn't at all the case. I was only feeling that was because my PT in the ICU only visited twice a week and mostly just stopped in and left, without doing anything with me. Looking back, I realize that his job was more to teach my family how to do different exercises and to help me stretch to keep range of motion, but in my almost comatose state, I didn't realize that at the time.

Everyone just kind of laughed it off and ignored my nonsense dream until Molly called that evening. She said "you'll never believe what I dreamed about last night! We were walking around outside your hospital room and laughing about how we should have gone to PT school." Seriously. And if that wasn't crazy enough, when Molly told her mom about the dream, her mom said she had the same dream a week prior to that. Every since then, I take these dreams pretty seriously. I know some are laughable, but some really might mean something. Anyways, I've listened to everyone else's dreams but hadn't really had any of my own until recently. Last week, I dreamt that I was at the gym getting ready, and while I was in the locker room, mom went to get the car but took my wheelchair with her! I was so mad...what was I supposed to do? How was I going to get outside? I took at that frustration and WALKED out to the car, just so I could tell her how mad I was, haha. I had a gait deficit and remember thinking about how hard it was to walk out there, but I did it. Mom joked that if that's all she takes, then she's going to take away the chair next time we're at the gym and see what happens, haha.

Then, last night, I had another dream. This time, it was Dad that I was mad at (I see a trending theme here..) This one was actually the most realistic dream, too. Like I can totally see this happening. I was downstairs in my room and Dad had packed so many random things in my room that I couldn't get around in the wheelchair. He has this habit of kind of hoarding things we don't need and whenever he doesn't know where something goes, it somehow ends up in my room. It's always been like this. So, I was in my room, surrounded by all the random stuff Dad put in there, I couldn't move around, so I decided to just get up and walk around the room. It's so believable too, haha! I told Dusty he's next.