It runs in the family

Last year my dad got really sick and of course it was the result of a freak convergence of things that led to a crazy diagnosis and he's probably now in medical journals, too. Like father, like daughter.

Out of respect for his privacy I won't go into full details, but the basics are this: he caught West Nile Virus from a mosquito bite, which spread to his spinal column and caused inflammation that went to his brain causing encephalitis. The swelling in his brain caused a rare form of Guillain-Barré Syndrome called Miller Fisher Syndrome that paralyzed him. He was very sick and in the hospital and then a rehab facility, followed by months of out patient care and PT. He still suffers from some residual issues related to the nerve damage his illness caused, but he has resumed driving and working. I can't tell you how happy I was the day he could finally move the muscles in his face to smile again!

It was nerve wracking watching him suffer and watching my mom suffer as she watched him suffer. It put us all through the wringer, but I'm so glad that Kate and I were close by and could come up and help him and my mom.

I've always said I'm a lot like my dad, and while I never thought we would both end up getting rare illnesses, of course we did.

Bionic Foot Graduation

I got my last x-ray and steroid shot last week and my podiatrist has signed off on me! Now I'm cleared to hike as far as I want (eh, let's work up to that), climb (I got some new shoes ready to go), and run (ahahahahahahha). It only took 8 years, but my foot is now better than it was even before I got sick with the mold.

Hopefully, that was that last surgery. KNOCK ON WOOD. I'm just not in the mood for that kind of recovery anymore. I think I've paid my dues. I'm good for a lifetime. Or three.

I'm all healed up just in time for us to move, you know how we do. This time we're moving to Chicago, but first we're headed to LA for a month to put up a show. Of course, we'll be hitting a bunch of National Parks along the way. I'm ready to do some more hiking with my bionic foot!

I still have an egg sized squishy bubble on the top of my foot that comes and goes. You can see the bottom and right perimeter of it pretty well in the photos here. My podiatrist said that it's directly to the right of where he put a half dozen screws and a 3 inch plate, so it's probably just residuals welling as that area adjusts to that extra hardware being there and is shifting some tissue around to accommodate for it. Fun stuff, I know. The new scar on top of my foot is already almost the same color as my scar from 2012.

The ankle scars are still really dark, even the punctures. You can see a big one at the top, then a small incision, big incision, then all
those smaller puncture holes peppered along the bottom of my front ankle. I figured they were like syringe holes and would go away after a few days, but I guess not. Who knows how much digging around they had to do through those to pull all my ligaments around and they had to use a lot of deep thick stitches on the incisions since they sit right on a bone/joint.

Not bad, not bad.