Bradley’s Severe Cortical Visual Impairment Blog

It’s a small world afterall

June 14th, 2009

We spent the weekend downtown again and saw everything that we wanted to see before we go home. Yeah!! We fill like we’ve seen all we wanted to see and have enjoyed our time in the country.  The other day when we checked into the hotel we walked into the lobby and what do you know, a couple of ASU Sun Devil students came up to us to say hello.  I was in my ASU visor and jason had a sun devil shirt on.  One of the boys had his sun devil shirt on too, go figure! It’s not like we saw them in another state, we saw them in a whole different country! It was very fun to chat with them.  We found out their with a group of students/friends who are over here touring for a few weeks.  They’re all ASU students except for one kid from UofA. Later, the next day, we were at the Jimo shopping area and we ran into more kids from the group.  What a small world.

We spent the morning touring and also ran into some other friends who are here getting treatment.  We stopped on the pier to talk to them and within 1 min. we were surrounded by Chinese people just staring at us and taking pictures.  I’ve never seen such a crowd.  We all immediately got out our cameras to take pictures of the audience that we drew and that seemed to thin them out.  They didn’t want THEIR picture taken but had no problem taking ours. haha.  Today was an interesting day and people seemed more curious than ever.  Many people touched both the boys and 2 or 3 people have actually tried to pick Bradley up out of his stroller!! I can tell that Tyler has begun to hate going places and just sits in the stroller with his head down and tells me he doesn’t want people to point and laugh at him anymore or touch him.  We told him to point and laugh back and say “boo” which means no.  We’ll have to change those directions once we get home. ha

Bradley’s last Stem Cell treatment is tomorrow! One more needle and one more time sitting still in a hot room for an hour.  He continues to do well.  He is walking like crazy! It is truly amazing to see the difference in his walking over the last 3 1/2 weeks. Before we came to Qingdao we’d be so excited if he’d walk 10-15 steps.  Now he’s walking 5-6 laps in the PT room and walking the entire hallway (which is about 80 yards) with very minimal assitance, we mostly just have to guide him away from the walls.  He is even learning how to go up stairs while holding on to the rail. He hates it but is getting better. He has truly benefited from being here and receiving all the treatments and therapies.  Some days I feel he has more control of his eyes but I know that we’ll just have to continue to play the waiting game to see if his vision has improved.  We’re willing to wait and have little doubt that these stem cells have helped in many ways.

We are going to miss everyone here.  The nurses, therapists, interpreters, and staff have been wonderful and have made this a good experience for us.  I know that Bradley will miss Andy more than anything and has made such huge amounts of progress because of him.  Only 2 more days on our countdown chain, (joking!) but we will be home soon.

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