State of the Author, September 2026 edition

I’ve been absent from the writer blog, in part because I have been struggling to actually get back to writing. I am writing again, but not at the same pace I was before November 8th of last year.

We still have a number of doctors who have a continuing interest in my youngest: cardiologist, nephrologist, endocrinologist, neurologist and neurosurgeon (these are two separate doctors). We are still not certain what caused the high blood pressure, and he is still taking multiple medications to make sure it doesn’t happen again — but the anxiety always eats part of my brain — the mom part, which has been quite loud.

For November and December, my brain was all mother-brain. Actually, while my son was in different hospitals, that was still the case. We got to bring him home on the 20th of February, and I foolishly thought that once he was home, I would naturally go back to a more normal (for me) life. This is not quite what happened, and those of you who’ve cared for convalescents at home probably understand this better than I did.

When we brought my youngest home, he couldn’t walk. So we had a wheelchair in an older house, which wasn’t designed with width of halls – or more specifically doorways – in mind. Before we came home, we had new hand rails and bars installed across the house, and we had the contractors – on very short notice – change the orientation of our bathroom doors. We had all spent time spotting my son on the PT gym’s practice stairs – but those stairs had five steps and the second floor of our house was 16 steps up.

So we had a few days of readjustment and colossal anxiety, because if anything went wrong, we were no longer in a hospital with instant 24/7 access to pharmacy or doctors. And we also had one more brain surgery to go – in theory a simple one, meant to put a large part of his right skull back.

My son had to adjust to the fact that being at home didn’t mean his life would instantly return to normal; there was a new normal, which was dependent on wheelchairs and required three of us to assist. But he could come down to eat dinner with us, and we could all sit down for a family meal again – something that did not happen once when he was in the hospital.

It’s now September. At the recommendation of the private PT, we got him a custom fitted brace. He took 45 minutes to go up and down the stairs when we got home, but that came down to 15 minutes with time, and the effort of going up and down the stairs was physiotherapy in its own right. By May he was not as dependent on a wheelchair, and by the end of May, we could go to the various doctor’s appointments without that chair, which saved probably 25 minutes of transit time.

And now, he can walk with the brace, and a little while ago, he stopped using the walking stick which had been very necessary to that point. He can’t use his left hand at the moment, but we were told way back in December that the hand is the last thing to come back from full paralysis. And that he needs to strengthen his shoulder muscles before that can happen.

But he’s diligent; he does what he can with his left arm/fisted hand, even when it would be way more convenient to just use his right hand. He has come a long way since November 2025, when we weren’t even certain he would survive, because the ICU people weren’t certain he would make it. We are just so grateful to have him back, to have him here. He wants his hand back, of course – and we want that for him, too. But for ourselves, we’re grateful.

As he moves toward his former normal life, his former independence, I have to move toward mother-of-adult-son, and not, as I was for months, just pure mother. I have to once again keep my worries and my anxiety to myself and let him take normal, everyday risks. I have to let him make decisions that my anxiety would never make, because I’m not him. I’m just his mother, and no healthy 27 year old wants to spend all of his time with his mother. Or his father. Or even his brother.

And it’s probably because of this that I’ve managed, in the past couple of weeks, to turn the engine of my brain around to move forward. I am writing West words now, at about the same pace as I was prior to November. I haven’t folded the Sagara words back in yet, but hope to do that by the end of this month.

It’s strange – it’s been ten months, and while the days dragged, the weeks flew. I hope to manage to be here more regularly – Michelle regularly – as things continue to improve at home.