Real friends

Kristi Keller and I were both wearing our FOTMD pins at the Harvest Festival of Dulcimers last September. Keith and I missed the festival the year before because it would've been hard for me to lug the respirator around the church grounds. ;-)

Yesterday, I copied the pages from the blog (Geekling Status Update) Keith started on Friends of the Mountain Dulcimer (FOTMD) to inform my friends about the dire situation I was in when I was in the coma. At the time, my condition looked hopeless. My FOTMD friends offered hopeful messages, condolences, and prayers. They did their best to buoy Keith's emotions through this nightmarish situation. I've only gotten hints at the kind of despair he went through as the doctors said there was no hope for my full recovery and referred to what would happen when, not if, I went into cardiac arrest. Keith is a highly rational person, and he based his hope not on emotion, but real evidence of my gradually improving awareness. At least some of my FOTMD friends, understandably, thought he was probably kidding himself, though they remained hopeful nonetheless. And when I did wake up from the coma, against all odds, they continued to offer us support and encouragement, not to mention innumerable virtual hugs. A few of them sent me get-well cards, which hung on the wall of my room in the nursing home, offering me tangible versions of those cyberspace hugs. Re-reading the posts as I saved them brought back the memories of how moved I felt when Keith told me about the love my FOTMD friends sent my way while I was the coma. It's returned a thousand percent; I'm smiling now as I type this. They have continued to stick by me during my long and difficult recovery.

FOTMD will soon be moving to a new web host. And due to the huge outpouring of support from my FOTMD friends, the two threads most concerned with my recovery, Greetings for Geekling--started by Carrie Barnes shortly after my awakening--and Gadding about with Geekling, are among the largest data hogs on the site. Strumelia, the founder of the site, asked members to remove any content that they no longer care about before the move. I do care--enormously--about these threads, as well as the posts in response to Geekling Status Update, but I realized that removing them would make the move easier and eliminate the cost of storing all of that data. So, I've been furiously saving the pages from the threads. I will eventually be posting the archival content on this blog for anyone who is interested, but an era in my life is about to come to an end.

On the Gadding about with Geekling thread, I've been posting photos taken during our rehab walks, accompanied by (usually) short essays about the day. I will soon be posting them here instead. For my Facebook friends who have been following my recovery and also giving me tremendous support, they will get a chance (if they so desire) to read my essays, which a number of my FOTMD friends enjoy, as well as see the additional photos that I post there. (Keith always posts some photos directly from his phone to Facebook.) I also post various recovery-related news on the "Gadding" thread that doesn't make it to this blog or Facebook, These tidbits might be of interest not only to my Facebook friends, but also to people experiencing their own recoveries, as well as their loved ones. Now, more people will be able to read these.

And my friends, who have stuck with me from the darkest days on, will still be there for me. Though I've never met most of the people on FOTMD following my recovery, they're very much real friends. Just like non-internet friends, they have put up with my kvetches, laughed at my jokes (or groaned), consoled me and continue to cheer me on. They're what puts the friends in Friends of the Mountain Dulcimer, and I'm more grateful to them than they will ever know. (I borrowed the smiley from FOTMD.)