An E-mail I Sent to Friends and Family

Dear everybody,

Friday at 4:40 I took the call from the nurse who said my test showed I am not pregnant. It was our second insemination. I thought for sure I was pregnant this time because I felt different—really weak for about 18 hours about three or four days after ovulation, but since I’ve looked at the calendar to determine that, I know the weird feeling was not due to pregnancy because it takes an egg 10 days to attach.

Mark and I are heartbroken, but we’ve decided not to go to any more drastic measures to try to conceive. As Mark says, “We’re not giving up. We’re just not jumping through hoops anymore.”

This weekend I had my teary moments, but I’m doing OK. Mark is too.

Thank you for all your prayers.

God's hand in my recovery

I believe in the cliché, “Giving credit where credit is due,” and, sure, I believe God had a hand in my recovery, but I also believe “God helps those who help themselves.”

At a signing in May, a woman heard me read from My Lost Summer:

Thanks to therapy and training from my mom, today, more than twenty years after the accident, no one besides me can tell I ever had a serious brain injury.

She voiced her disapproval that I did not credit God in my recovery. Why or how did this lady even think I believed in God? I do, but ours is a free country, I can follow any belief I want.

I consciously limited the mention of God in My Lost Summer because that’s not what the book’s about; the book’s not about my family’s faith or non-faith in God—or any higher being. The book’s about my recovery, and I wrote it for the purpose of enlightening caregivers or readers in general about the experiences of the newly conscious coma survivor.

I credit mostly my mom with my full recovery. Since I’ve written this book, lots of people say, “Wow, you must have had some wonderful doctors,” and I suppose I did have, but they were “behind the scenes” players. My mom is who worked with me every day, who changed the bulletin board in my room in ICU, even though I was comatose, in order that I might be stimulated. Once I gained consciousness, she is who challenged me with simple puzzles and games, once I was released from the hospital, she is who defied doctors’ advice and sent me on to 8th grade.

The perfect cliché to end with is “God helps those who help themselves” –or those who help their daughters.

Fluorescent v. Incandescent, Paper v. Plastic

Several posts back, I told you that Mark has jumped on the “Save the Environment” bandwagon since we watched Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Last week the light bulb in our family room lamp expired, and, after learning that a fluorescent burns less energy than an incandescent, he bought a coiled up fluorescent bulb.

One fluorescent equals the burn time of 13 incandescents.
90% of energy consumed by incandescents is wasted heat.

As lights throughout the house burn out, we’ll replace with fluorescent. While the bulbs are more expensive, they are cheaper in the long run because they last longer, use less energy ot give the same amount of light, and, in the summer, they won't heat up the house. They are, overall, a savings for your pocketbook and to our environment.

A few days ago Mark asked rhetorically, “Why do they even still make incandescent bulbs?” Thankfully, the question was rhetorical because I didn’t have any answer, but it got me thinking—or wondering why, in fact, do they still manufacture incandescent lightbulbs.

The night of Mark’s enlightening question, he watched another show and learned that about 12 million barrels of oil are used to produce the nearly 100 billion plastic bags we in American use (usually just once) every year. Now he asked, “Why do they make plastic bags?”

We could all do our part and buy fluorescent and reuse our bags or buy reusable, cloth bags.
When only purchasing a handful of items, ask the cashier to skip the bag.
At restaurants, go ahead and take home your leftovers—you paid for them, after all—just box them up yourself and skip the bag. (The only restaurant I know that gives a plastic bag in which to carry home the carton patrons scoop leftovers into is The Cheesecake Factory, but surely there are others out there. Choose paper over plastic at the grocery, but…

…from www.SierraClub.org/bags, “…the difference between paper and plastic RECYCLING is small…” But they preface this with “Paper is easier to recycle, being accepted in most recycling programs. The recycling rate for plastic bags is very low.” And before that the site gives these points in support of shopping with reusable, cloth bags:

• Reusing a bag meant for just one use has a big impact. A sturdy, reusable bag needs only be used 11 times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable plastic bags.
  
• In New York City alone, one less grocery bag per person per year would reduce waste by 5 million lbs. and save $250,000 in disposal costs.
• 
  Plastic bags carry 80% of the nation's groceries, up from 5% in 1982.
• 
  When 1 ton of paper bags is reused or recycled, 3 cubic meters of landfill space is saved and 13 - 17 trees are spared! In 1997, 955,000 tons of paper bags were used in the United States.
  When 1 ton of plastic bags is reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil are saved.

Every little thing helps, and they’re only little things.

Mmmm, naps

Shhhhh. I just took a 5-minute snooze on a table out front. Don’t tell anybody I work with.

A couple ladies who were on their smoke break woke me up asking if I were OK. I thanked them for waking me. Five minutes is all I needed; I feel totally refreshed now.

I walked in with the ladies who woke me, and one said she cannot sleep in a chair. The other said she could sleep anywhere, could probably sleep standing up if she was exhausted enough. I can sleep anywhere in any position pretty much too (though I’ve never tried a standing sleep).

Mark’s parents have the family over the Sunday after Thanksgiving every year, and with all the hullabaloo—kids running around, card games going on, football on TV—I still manage to sleep curled up on the loveseat right in the middle of it all. I got the ability from my mom. We’re both out like a light when our heads hit the pillow—or whatever is available. Our husbands are jealous.

Fourth of July, 2007

The 4th of July was great this year. As some of you know, July 4th, 1983 is the date of my accident that left me in a coma and the hospital for 90 days.

In ’83, my mom, some friends and I were riding our horses to be in the Franklin 4th of July parade. Franklin’s just a town over from Carlisle, where I grew up.
On our way, my horse fell, so did I, and my head hit the road. Thus, the coma.

Anyway, this year was great. I was in the Franklin parade again. I think it was my first time in the parade since 1984, when, on the one-year anniversary of my accident, the parade committee asked me to be the Grand Marshall. My two older brothers and I rode in the back seat of a classic convertible and waved to friends and relatives lining the route. In this picture the top is being brought up because it was raining.

Since our ride at the front of the parade, one of my brothers has grown a local business, Evans Excavating & Topsoil. For a decade or more he has driven a dump truck in the parade to promote his work and have fun. Several years ago, he bought a little dump truck produced in 1922. You know parades bring out all the old cars, and this year he drove his little dump truck, my sister-in-law next to him and their children and two grandchildren (twins!) in the back sitting on two bails of hay. (The twins sat on laps).

While they rode in comfort on that sunny yet not-too-hot July morning, I walked/ran the mile-and-a half route, handing out bookmarks as I went. My sister-in-law, riding in the old dump truck, had boxes of my bookmarks next to her, and she would resupply me when my stock ran short.

It’s a great way to promote my book. I handed out about 400 bookmarks in total along the mile-and-a-half route. I’m going to look into walking other area parades to get the communities talking about my book again.