Mark exercising - who would have believed it

The pic below is not our new computer friend, it's Mark instrument of torture. It's new technology and we're thankful we know the man who owns the company who is importing them into the UK. It operates by electrical stimulation. So Mark gets wired up by sticking pads on his upper leg muscles, front and back and on his gluts (bum). Then I strap his chair as close as possible and strap his feet onto the foot plates, plug him in and off he goes (will take a piccy of him doing it when I get him some shorts, right now he's working out in his boxers and that's not a site for public consumption lol).

He's on it for approximately 20 mins now and should be working up to an hour as time goes on. What's it for .... reversing muscle atrophy, improving general circulation, increasing the range of passive movement in legs and supposedly reducing muscle spasms and in Marks case hopefully reduce the swelling in his legs and preventing the build up of fluid once they've gone down. It's a very clever piece of kit, all its workout progammes are online, once your programme has been set, you log in and it takes you through it. The programme was altered by Stuart (friendly importer) online last night to increase Marks time, so we'll see how he gets on today. After using it for 4 days it has already reduced the swelling in his legs and started to calm his spasms down.

We're not sure how long we'll have it, depends on when it gets sold to the next person with enough pennies to buy it - it's ONLY about £15,000 - but with insurance payouts as big as they are now, the disabled market is a big spender.

We're coming to the end of our first week with our Care Package assessment process. An NHS team come in for 4 - 6 weeks to stabilise a care package then they pass it to a private agency. When it goes to the agency we have to start paying towards it, so now we're beginning to assess just how good -or not - we think it is, and I have to say I'm not very impressed. Seems its a matter of how quick can we get in and back out and what's the minimum we can do while we're here. It will be a week tomorrow since he came home and so far they haven't even washed his hair, or asked if he wants to clean his teeth. So last night I washed his hair myself. We have a gap of what they think their remit is and what we think is reasonable, so over this next week hopefully we will close that gap because at the moment what we will get for our money is b****r all!!

P.S. you'll be pleased to know he can clean his teeth and they haven't all fallen out - but they don't know that!!