Week 5: 10-31-2011 Ruby Update

Ruby has been hospitalized in Los Angeles for a month now. For the last two weeks she has been in the children's rehabilitation ward as she undergoes physical, occupational, and speech therapy every day. Each day shows some signs of improvement. Though she is still very wobbly, she has been able to take quite a few steps on her own over the last couple of days. This has been hugely encouraging to the family. She has gone from "yeah" being her only word to being able to occasionally say, "no", "mama", and "da" (we think she's trying to say "dad"). While she is lifting her right arm a bit, it is still largely ignored as she does not use it to reach for or manipulate anything. We found out at the end of last week that the doctors and therapists think she's going to need to stay in the hospital for 6 more weeks and follow that treatment with another 6-8 months of out-patient therapy.