First Test

I apologize for not being able to post anything on Monday as promised, but we lost internet access over the last 2 days.

As planned, we visited Mirna on Monday. We took the entire system over to her house and we were able to see Mirna for the first time (at least Julio and I). We had both prepared for this moment and were counting on each other and on God's support to handle the situation appropriately. In the beginning, it was shocking to see Mirna since we still remembered her the way she was before the incident, but we were able to handle the situation very well right after we both hugged her and kissed her on the forehead and we could see that there was a lot of emotion on both ends. In order to avoid getting too emotional, both my brother Carlos, my friend Julio and I quickly began talking to her about the story about getting her the system (we talked about OFOA, ADTRAN people and more) and we were able to get to a level where we were all comfortable talking to her and seeing her.

Mirna's family (her mom and sister) are immensely grateful towards all the people that have contributed to this cause and asked us to share their gratefulness with you via this blog.

After the initial explanation of the system to Mirna (she was saying Yes or No by blinking or raising her eyes), we proceeded to hook her up. We had to make some minor adjustments in the beginning, but everything regarding the hook up of the system was pretty straight forward and we felt good about Gabriella's (Mirna's sister) confidence about setting it up and using it. We then explained to Mirna the first steps on how to control the mouse and we asked her to move the mouse from right to left only. We also warned her that we all needed to be very patient and that a lot of practice would be needed to master the system.

Once we turned the system on and once we gave her control of the mouse, Mirna took over with so much ease that we were all simply amazed. We made minor modifications to the gain and damping settings, but we were all amazed on how easy she picked it up and how she was controlling the mouse (at least on the horizontal direction). Thinking it over after, we could have not expected anything less from Mirna since she has always been a fighter and a very dedicated, driven and motivated person.

She was following directions to the dot and she only had some issues on keeping the mouse steady on a fixed location, but that is expected. We kept doing this exercise for a while, giving her the necessary breaks, but when we would asked her to see if she wanted to stop, she would blink saying NO....she really wanted to go on. We were all by then having a great time, seeing her making amazing progress in just a few hours.

We then moved into the Horizontal control (which is supposed to be harder) and we had some issues with the electrodes, gel and location, but after some tweaking, we were able to get some signals into the EE (eagle eyes system). Since she was in a wheelchair that reclines, we could not get a straight position and we decided to move the monitor to a higher location on the desk. Once we did this, she was able to move the mouse up and down better. It was a little bit more difficult, but she still did a great job given the circumstances.

We can see and based on Gabriella's assessment, Mirna is very excited about the system since she understands how much it will help her to communicate. We have left the system in her house and Gabriella will perform another couple of tests through the week and we will reconvene on Friday to check for any improvements.

All in all, it was a great day of hope and achievement with Mirna. We all continue to be hopeful that she will take full advantage of the system and will be communicating with all of us soon in a much efficient way. We have obtained permission from her family to take pictures of Mirna using the system, so we will post them as soon as we get them.

Thanks to all for praying for her!!.

God bless.