Lyme Disease

Yes. It is official. Kim has Lyme disease and facial paralysis known as Bell’s Palsy. Her face started going numb during a meeting on September 8th. She called her doctor who told her to go straight to the emergency room. Facial paralysis can be a symptom of a few different things. Two of the most common are strokes and Lyme disease. Kim’s vitals were fine so it wasn’t a stroke, and Lyme disease was the most likely suspect.

They prescribed prednisone for the Bell’s Palsy. There was some confusion over her antibiotics. The center for infectious diseases recommends starting the course of antibiotics when there is strong indication of Lyme disease, even before a positive test comes back. A resident at the hospital called us and said he would call in the prescription. However, this got lost in the shuffle and the prescription didn’t get called in until Monday afternoon, after the Lyme disease test came back positive, several trips to the pharmacist and several phone calls.

Kim slept pretty much without interruption from Friday when she got home until sometime on Monday. She is slowly getting her energy back and is starting to get restless. The paralysis of the face seems to be diminishing, resulting in a lot of pain.

Meanwhile, I’ve been fighting some minor cold. We are thinking that Kim may have had this cold on top of the Lyme disease, exacerbating the conditions. Fiona, fortunately, seems to have avoided the cold and is simply suffering from lack of sufficient parental attention. This is being compensated by her being spoiled by her grandparents this weekend.

People have been incredibly kind in helping us during this difficult week, and it is greatly appreciated.

40 Laptops

Well, I’ve refurbished thirty-seven of the forty laptops that I’ve been working on. Most of them are sitting in my living room waiting for distribution. The final three are special cases. Right now, I believe I can manage to get two out of the three running. I’ve been thinking a lot about these laptops as well as what they represent in our society. It is unclear what will happen to them after they have served their new purpose, but perhaps some of them can go to Community Technology Centers in Connecticut.

email, etc.
I’ve been deleting a lot of messages on the lower priority mailing lists that I’m on, almost as quickly as new mails have come in, so I’m not substantially over the 1000 unread emails I was at a week ago. I really haven’t read much on any of the blogs however.

Public Domain Torrents
As Kim gets restless, I’ve been trying to find reasonable things to entertain her with. A while ago, I downloaded A Farewell to Arms off of Public Domain Torrents. I’m currently downloading First Spaceship on Venus.

More later.