I get by with a little help from my friends

During my recovery, my friends on Friends of the Mountain Dulcimer (FOTMD) and Facebook have been cheering me on through my many ups and downs. I can't tell you how pleased I am that my perseverance and emotional strength throughout these struggles has been inspirational for so many of them, but I wouldn't have been able to get through this without their encouraging posts and innumerable virtual hugs. Their support has been just as inspirational to me.

Along the way, I've left a trail of cyberspace bread crumbs worthy of Hansel and Gretel. It started with a blog Keith posted on FOTMD after I fell into a deep coma: Geekling Status Update, when it looked like I was unlikely to survive. Next came the thread that Carrie Barnes started to cheer me up in the nursing home after, against all odds, I awoke from the coma with all my mental faculties intact: Greeting for Geekling. (Note: The most interesting parts are near the beginning, when I was was taking my first steps and finally being allowed to eat food.) This blog contains my first posts after the awakening, when I could barely hold the stylus in my hand to peck out the words one letter at a time. I find the countless typos rather amusing, since I'm such a perfectionist.

As my strength grew, I started my own thread that became a blog of my continuing recovery: Gadding about with Geekling. The thread features many photos Keith took on our garden walks to improve my walking. At first, a four-wheeled rollator was too challenging for me. Later, when I was stable enough to keep the rollator from rolling away from me, I graduated from the two-wheeled walker I had been using, which allowed me to walk much farther. The pictures are another kind of log of my physical progress.

The prednisone I was taking for my autoimmune disease, dermatomyositis (DM), weakened my immune system and caused me to come down with Legionnaires' disease, which is what made me to fall into the coma in the first place. But when I wrote this blog about how I diagnosed my DM via Dr. Google, prednisone was still a godsend, since I had already sustained a great deal of muscle damage from the DM: I won the lottery, but what I got was no prize. Fortunately, my DM went into remission while I was in the coma. I'm stepping down from prednisone now, and I will soon be able to discontinue it completely. Besides the coma, prednisone has also given me severe osteoporosis. Before the advent of prednisone, DM was often fatal, but talk about double-edged swords!