Josh is reading an old post on the blog so it's time for an update!

Josh and Me at Torrey Pines Lodge having breakfast.

Mike, Angie and Tyler came to visit this summer. It was fun!

From left to right, Mike, Josh, Angie, Natalie and Tyler.

Don and Josh at Barona Casino where Josh made some money playing

Texas Hold 'Em.

This is what Josh did to his leg when he drove a golf cart!

It was horrible! This picture was taken at Scripps Hospital.

I think I better update Josh's blog before the year is over. Time is flying and before you know it Christmas will be here. I haven't updated Josh's blog in months. I am totally and completely burnt out on Josh's brain injury. I just walked in the computer room a few minutes ago and Josh had just googled, "When does Josh Mendell go back to Arizona?" Josh was reading an old blog post from 2008.... here we are two years later and it's the same old stuff. Josh keeps asking about college. Everyday he sends me a message on Facebook, "Send me back to Zona!" It's very nerve-racking and crazy... He apparently has some very vivid memories of his college days at U of A and thinks about it every now and then. I refer him to a tab in his planner which explains what happened to him and why he's not at college. I'll tell him, "Your brain needs to heal." Josh will scream, "My brain has healed!" Sometimes I'll say, "Don't you think you need a memory in order to return to college?" This is really not a good thing to say because sometimes he'll get angry. Sometimes I'll say, "Your brain is getting better, but you're not totally better." I guess the best thing to say is "Read your planner." It's better than trying to explain every time he asks...

Josh is now perseverating big time on his driver's license. He constantly asks, "Where's my driver's license?" So now we have a license tab in the back of his planner which explains why he doesn't have a driver's license. So when Josh asks this question, I say, "Read your planner." The planner explains about his DUI and the fact that the cop took his driver's license. It also explains that two days after his DUI he ended up in a coma from an overdose. He reads the planner, then goes downstairs and plays XBOX. Every so often, he'll yell, "Mom, where's my license?" It's very frustrating...

Speaking of driving, Don M., one of Josh's trainers and caregivers, let Josh drive a golf cart at the club, and Josh ended up with severe lacerations on his left leg. Instead of putting on the brakes, he stuck his leg outside of the golf cart and badly skinned his shin. It was horrible and extremely poor judgment on Don's part. I was livid. I took Josh to the hospital where they cleaned it up, put wound gel on it and covered it. He had an open wound for almost a month. I took him back to the hyperbaric oxygen clinic and he had several sessions. That's behind us now. After the injury, Josh would look at his leg and ask "What happened to my leg?" I had to make another tab in the planner called LEG and write a detailed explanation of what happened. I would tell Josh to refer to his planner whenever he asked the question. This was maddening...

It is still very hard for me to see Josh's progress, but his teachers at the ABI Program constantly tell Zack (Josh's caregiver and teacher who drives him every day to ABI) that Josh is improving. In fact, Josh is now attending the ABI Program in the afternoons as well as the mornings. The afternoon sessions are held at a cultural center downtown and are more like college classes meaning that you can pick which class you want to attend that day, such as reading comprehension, analytical reasoning and speech. This is a good thing. Josh's speech continues to be a problem and I have enrolled him in weekly sessions with Herb Hein at the Hein Speech Center. It is expensive, but hopefully will pay off over time. Herb is very animated and fun. Josh is enjoying the sessions and hopefully the constant cueing will pay off. We are constantly telling Josh, "Speak one syllable at a time...slowly." We also had a session with one of Josh's ABI teachers, Julie, who came to the house and taught us some of the exercises for the Beckman Oral Motor Assessment & Intervention method. This method actually calls for the speech teacher (or someone) to physically manipulate some of the muscles around the mouth. For example, the upper lip stretch requires that you put your index figure sideways on the upper lip and massage side to side. There are a series of exercises which we are supposed to do, but this requires that you put on rubber gloves and physically do the manipulations to the muscles. I can honestly say that I do not do this religiously with Josh. In fact, every day I say I am going to do the exercises with Josh, but then I don't. The exercises really don't take that much time, so I should definitely do them. I am just burnt out and sick of the whole thing!

I also have hired Pedro Leon, a physical therapist and brain injury consultant, to help with Josh's physical exercises. He has gone to the gym with Don on several occasions and instructed him on what he should be doing with Josh to maximize his balance and even out his left side which sustained more damage than the right side. Pedro wrote out a specific routine which Don now does with Josh when they go to the gym. Hopefully, this will help.

My nephew, Zach, came to stay with us for a few weeks this summer and was dying to go to a casino since he was 18 and could legally gamble at the Indian casinos. We went to Barona one evening. Natalie, Zach and I bopped around the casino and played slots while Josh and Don went to the poker room. Josh was walking as fast as he could. He was so thrilled to be in the casino. He knew just where to go and what to do. He ended up making some money playing Texas Hold 'Em. At first, he was down $52, but then ended up with $120. When Natalie, Zack and I went to check on him, there he was sitting with stacks of $1 chips in front of him. It looked like a lot of money, but all the chips were $1 chips. It's pretty amazing that Josh's short term memory works just fine when he's in a poker game. He was all smiles and remembered that he won for about two hours. That was fun.

That's all the news for now, folks. Thanks for keeping up with Josh's progress. Hopefully next time I update the blog I'll have some amazing breakthroughs to report.

It's been five months since I published a post on Josh's blog. Here's an update

We survived another Christmas and even managed to send out Happy Holiday greetings to our friends and family. The first half of the alphabet received a Happy Holidays greeting card and the second half of the alphabet received a Happy New Year's card. I didn't send out New Year's cards until almost the end of January. Oh well, I am behind in my life and am feeling pretty tired and overwhelmed lately. This, too, will pass as they say. I am actually very fortunate and have a great deal to be thankful for. I could be in a homeless tent with no family and friends in sight... My business is literally 15 yards from the Alpha Project Homeless tent which is set up each year for several months. I see people that are down and out every day and I think to myself, "Wow, how did it come to this?" The City of San Diego has slashed the hours of the police who are part of the Homeless Task Force which is really a shame. These are truly the only cops that I like since they act more like social workers and actually have files on most of the people in the streets. They do a lot of good in getting the homeless the help which they need. Times are really tough right now and we're seeing more and more people that are homeless that don't look the part at all...

Oh yeah, this blog is about Josh. I haven't updated the blog in five months. That's a long time. I think I have a lot to tell. I actually think Josh has improved a bit. Josh still wakes up every morning a happy camper. He whistles for the dogs and calls them in his high pitched voice, "Ruffy, Daisy!" He's sweet. Then he'll immediately go downstairs to fire up the XBOX and will scream every now and then that he's in the Super Bowl. He'll manipulate the game so the other team, most likely, the Raiders, cannot score at all. Nothing. Not even a field goal. Then, he'll yell, "Mom! Mom!" I'll go downstairs and he'll proudly show me the score with a huge smile on his face....something like 120 to 0. I'll say, "Congratulations! You're amazing." Then, I tell Josh he has to get ready for the ABI Program. He is still going four days a week. He is participating in class discussions and is somewhat of a ring leader now which is great. He still has terrible dsyarthria (slurring of the speech), but he'll keep talking until you understand what he's saying. He is very social and is still a team player. He just does not realize cognitively the seriousness of his injury which I think is probably a good thing in many ways. The psychologist used to tell me, "Just wait. Josh will eventually get extremely depressed over his condition..." This has not happened. I have stopped seeing Dr. B because I felt after seeing her for almost 2 years that I was not getting any useful information. Besides her office was piled so high with yellow legal pads that it made me nervous to sit in a rocking chair next to her and talk. One day I said to her, "You could probably just throw away that towering pile of notes and never miss a thing..." She just kind of smiled back. Not only did she have piles and piles of papers every where, she had half empty water bottles all over the place and bags of almonds and tins of mints every where. The waiting room was always full of patients and she spread herself so thin, it was not conducive to healing. Enough about her. Back to Joshy.

It's little things that I see that I make a mental note of and say to myself, "Yeah, I think Josh is getting better or at least more aware of what is happening around him." For example, Josh used to (and often still does) read every sign he saw while I was driving. He'd say, "Wells Fargo now open", "Chevy's Tex Mex", "Denny's open 24 hours", etc. Now he'll see a new restaurant and say, "We should try that place." Yesterday when we were driving through Little Italy, Josh asked if we could stop and eat at a new place.

The other day at dinner, Josh asked the waiter what the difference was between the shrimp tempura roll and some other roll. I was pretty impressed. I know this may sound like nothing to you guys, but it is a breakthrough. Josh is getting more cognitive.

A few days ago, Josh was multi-tasking. He was playing Play Station Portable and was on Facebook at the same time. He had the PSP in one hand and was typing with the other. He had never done that before. Speaking of Facebook, Josh is so cute, one day he wrote on his wall, "What day is it?" Somebody sent him a link to the day and time which I thought was cute. One day he wrote on my wall, "Mom, when am I going back to college?" Another time he wrote, "Mom, I love you." He wrote in his profile a single sentence -- "I love myself." He's funny. He constantly checks on Brittany's Facebook to see what she is doing and where she is. He still asks, "Am I still going out with Brittany?" He constantly tries to call her old cell number which now belongs to someone else. I think Josh told whoever answered the phone what our phone number was because the phone rang one night, I answered it and this guy says to me, "Someone from your house is calling and talking to my wife and he is speaking a 'foreign' language and it is annoying...." I explained to the guy that it was my son who had a brain injury and was dialing up his old girlfriend's cell phone number. The guy was understanding... Apparently, they just had a baby and it was annoying to constantly hear from Josh. Josh remembers everything from the past concerning numbers. He remembers every gate code we have ever had. Sometimes when we are walking home from dinner, he'll start pressing all these old combinations to get the gate to open. It's amazing that he remembers the combinations. Josh also remembers every maid that we have ever had. Sometimes before he goes to bed, he'll say, "Where's Elva?" or "Where's Matilda?" These gals have been gone for years.

Josh is now perseverating on a host of different topics. It used to be, "Where's Dad?" twenty four hours a day. I would say Josh's favorite topic to be stuck on is my age. He is absolutely amazed at my age. He'll say, "How old are you?" I tell him 56 and he says, "Oh, wow!!!" The other night my girlfriend, Ellen was having dinner with us and Josh whispers in my ear, "Who is older you or Ellen?" He has that smirk on his face. He just gets the biggest kick out of this age thing. He asks Mike Jones, Zack, and Don Mooney every day how old they are. He sometimes says, "Mom, how old am I? 23? 24?" Besides the age thing, Josh is now perseverating big time on the Super Bowl. He asks ten times a day or more, "Who's in the Super Bowl?" He also asks who the Chargers lost to in the playoffs. Josh cannot store what you tell him or what he sees or what he does for longer than a few minutes. He cannot transfer the event to the long-term memory part of his brain. The synapses do not connect. The event just dissipates and is gone from his mind. Every once in a great while, he will remember something that occurred a day or so ago.

Josh is doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy again. He has had four treatments in two weeks. Two back to back sessions and now he's going once a week. The treatments will keep him healthy and hopefully help with his balance.

That's it for now! Thanks for reading Josh's blog! Family and friends, please stop by any time. We had a great xmas holiday with our cousins, Chrissy and Bruce, pictured above in front of the Hotel Del Xmas tree!