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Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Walking with Joella's dog where coyotes pupped


Tumblrs: Conejo Valley Botanic Garden

The last time we went to the Conejo Valley Botanic Garden, in with Joella and her Australian terrier Sadie, in June, 2015, they were barred from the garden because coyotes had been spotted in the garden with their pups.

Luckily, there's a nice community park right outside the botanic garden. We eventually left them to rest while we walked through the botanic garden. Still, the highlight of the day was our picnic together, when we watched a family of juvenile squirrel frolicking and poking in and out of passageways under the concrete of a drainage ditch like Whack-a-Moles.



That was our second visit. The first was only the second time I had used my hiking sticks to climb stairs without rails--and these were much longer flights than those had been. Stairs have gotten so old hat for us now that Keith often doesn't even bother to take pictures of me climbing them. Sunday, while Joella walked up the ramp to the garden, I took the stairs.

That visit was also the first time that we left my wheelchair behind at a new garden while I was using the hiking sticks. I guess you could call it a leap of faith that I could do without it.

And now I've left the wheelchair behind for good.
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Coma Girl

Coma Girl

Not a miracle recovery, but a miracle of modern medicine

In 2013 I fell into a six-week coma and nearly died after I contracted legionella. The Legionnaire's disease was in turn triggered by immunosuppression caused by the prednisone I was taking for my rare autoimmune disease, dermatomyositis.

I suffered a series of strokes on both sides of my brain when the sepsis caused my blood pressure to plummet. I fell into a deep coma. My kidneys and lungs began to fail, as my body was began dying one organ at a time. My doctors told my loved ones to give up hope for my full recovery. They expected me to die, and even if I somehow lived, I would remain a vegetable or at best left so hopelessly brain-damaged that I would never be same. But unbeknownst to them, while they were shining lights in my eyes and shaking their heads, I was telling them in my coma-dream--my secular version of a near-death experience--to leave me alone because I was trying to get back to sleep. I was experiencing what is known as covert cognition, the subject of my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," which appeared in their July/August issue.

But it wasn't a miracle--despite what so many continue to believe--that I recovered so fully. I owe my life not to God, but the miracles of modern medicine, as well as the nature of the watershed-area brain damage I suffered, as I detailed in my article and in this blog.