Monday through Sunday, December 3rd through 16th

Hello again,

It's has been a very busy past couple of weeks with the holiday season in full swing but I believe our Christmas shopping and preparation is mostly complete. Thank goodness for that!! :) Tori unfortunately became sick for a few days with some vomiting and a congested cough but she worked her way past it and is now doing much better. We presume she caught something from one of us because we all had a cold at one point or not during the two weeks. We have been playing it safe and haven't been taking her outside much at all. It has also been very cold lately with temperatures remaining below freezing.

Tori's range of motion in her arms, shoulders and legs has improved dramatically with Cari's continued PT sessions. She measured an 80 degree bend in her right knee this past week. When Tori cooperates with Cari her flexibility is fairly good but if she is not in the mood for stretching it's about impossible to stretch her due to the resistance and tension she creates in her muscles. Jake and Meredyth continue to provide sessions during the week as well. We are trying another adaptive device called the MightyMo with Tori and it is basically a Tablet PC with some powerful software installed. Hopefully it will allow Tori to select a wide variety of buttons presented on the screen. You can even attach voice responses to the selections. The Head Mouse it leverages doesn't quite work for Tori since she has to turn her head to move the mouse. I'm hoping to connect her retinal scanning camera to the system which allows her to just focus with eyes to move the mouse around the screen. I am still undecided whether she can actually comprehend the the choices presented to her. Based on how Tori responds to choices either on paper or on the computer I sometimes have no doubts and other times I am completely doubtful... So the struggle for consistent and cognitive communication from Tori continues. We will never stop trying to reach her or provide her the means to reach us.

I still follow any and all stem cell research news and it seems each day there is a promising new study released. Most of the progress is still seen in labs but vast potential remains. There is no doubt that stem cell advancements and procedures will revolutionize health care as we now know it. Here are just a few of the stem cell sites I follow regularly:

Science Daily
Stem Cell Research News
Stem Cells China
Stem Cells Puhua

I also use Google Alerts which notify me via email on any new stem cell related news articles. I highly recommend using this free feature that Google provides.

Thank you all once again and may everyone have a wonderful holiday season!!

The Schmanski Family - Tim, Maria, Tori, Whitney and Brendan