Small celebrations

If a couple of years ago you told me that touching my nose with my left hand would be a celebratory experience, I would have snikered at you. But today I am telling the world! I think it's been obvious that my left arm has been a huge source of frustration for me, but with these things, recovery tends to work it's way from the head down meaning my fingers, toes, ankles and wrists will probably be the last to show up, for months now I've been trying to get my left hand up to my mouth, but my muscles have been too weak to get it up that far, my arm starts shaking like crazy when I get it to thr apex of the move. But I've been releasing my arm from the sling it normally sits in s few times a day to give it the ability to move around a bit, if you don't use it you lose it, right?So I've been working on bending the arm as I sit watching tv and today when I felt the tip of my knucklre brush my nose, I knew all that bending and bending and frustration had paid off., now back to the sling, my arm sits in a sling because the shoulder muscles are so weak they can't hold up the weight of my arm as it shangs at my side, so my shoulder gets a little sore if my arm hangs free, plus I bang the hand into stuff if I let it blow in the wind, I'm also a little self-conscious about my floppy arm and the sling just makes it look like I hurt myself rather than being paralyzed, but earlier this week Matt pointed out to me that if I leave the arm in the sling all day and don't move it around as a result, I could lose use of it altogether and that I should take the sling off for a few hours a day so I work on moving the arm, I'm also supposed to be putting weight on the aerm by leaning on it to build strength. So that's what I've been doing this week, I hate it when Matt is right! Because he always is! SI guess the next step is to keep bending my arm to my mouth until it's easy, this just proves that with a little hard qork and stubborn determination, anything is possible!