A brief update on life, because other­wise I’m still strug­gling to get words written. My youngest is now walking inde­pen­dently. At the recom­men­da­tion of his Phys­io­ther­a­pist, we had an ankle brace made for him. It fits under his foot and rests just below his knee, and it’s a semi-rigid brace. The intro­duc­tion of the brace led to imme­diate improve­ments in his quality of life: he started to walk outside of the house, and he changed the way he comes down the stairs (prior to brace, he backed down the stairs, one step at a time). After a week of exper­i­men­ta­tion with outside walking, he started to venture out on his own. He’s always gone for walks during the day, and he wants – of course … Continue reading →

A comment that came in reminded me that I have been entirely absent from my author site for a couple of months. I have not been writing. On the 8th of November, my youngest son had a hemor­rhagic stroke. The strokes with which I’m most familiar are ischemic — blood clots. Hemor­rahgic strokes differ by cause and by how damage to the brain is done. The cause was uniden­ti­fied high blood pres­sure, as opposed to an aneurysm, and it took some time to figure out what had caused this, although they now feel reason­ably certain they know (hyper-aldes­tero­nism). Of the four people in our family, he’s the one who’s in the best phys­ical shape — or he was, before the stroke. The stroke took left-side func­tion­ality from him, … Continue reading →