My Daughter Chronicles

It's the 22nd anniversary of Mia's accident today, and once again, like it did in 2003, it falls on Good Friday.  It is, as you can imagine, not really a good Friday for us, but such is life. For the past several years, I haven't had much to write about with regard to Mia, because her life has been pretty stable.  She goes to high school, she goes to summer camp, she has some therapy, she watches television.  There's just not much to write about.  That's not a bad thing -- the less she has going on, probably the better for her health -- but it does make for fewer posts here on the blog.  Yes, I wrote about her Botox a few weeks ago , but other than that, life has been pretty calm around here.  She's in her final year of school, and she's going to "graduate" in about a month, which bums us out.  She's always loved school, so the fact that she can't go anymore is vexing.  I certainly get it, but it's still annoying.  As I've always no...

Many years ago, we decided to give Mia injections of botulinum toxin, which is, of course, known more commonly as Botox® (it's a registered trademark, so I don't want to get in any trouble!).  She first got it done in 2006, when she was only 4 years old (Jeebus, tempus fugit), as I wrote about here , and again in 2012 . After that, we decided to stop doing it, because diminishing returns started to kick in and we didn't want to keep doing it to her (she didn't have any side effects, but if something isn't working, why keep doing it?). We did Botox partly because she has a twitch in her leg that bugs her, and we hoped that Botox would help alleviate that. It did, but not to the extent that we hoped. So we stopped doing it and hoped she could live with the twitchiness. I've written about her twitch before (at least I think I have; it's been a while). It's not clonus , as far as anyone who knows about this stuff can tell, and nobody is sure what it...

I've been writing these posts for a very long time - the first time I wrote an annual "accounting" was in 2005 - and I know, over the past few years, they have become more ... perfunctory, I suppose, although I do like writing them and I try to find some new things to say.  But as Mia has grown, things with her just don't change too much, and so these posts just don't have the new information that people might want.  I will keep writing these posts, of course, and I do always plan to write on this blog more than once a year, so we'll see, but it does bug me that these posts might not be more entertaining for the readers (not that I have readers!).  Mia's life is interesting, but she has reached a plateau in terms of her development, which is good for her and for her parents, but not great for people who want to get some updates about her.  So, here we go. It is, of course, the anniversary of Mia's accident.  On 18 April 2003, we were hit by a flatbed ...

It's 18 April, which means it's Mia's anniversary, and once again I lament that this is the only time I update her blog.  I don't mean to - it's just that things get away from me, and suddenly it's a year later, and here we are again.  On 18 April 2003, Mia and I were the car accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury, meaning it's been ... yikes, 20 years.  I don't mind her getting older except that it reminds me that I'm getting older! The reason I don't write as much as I used to is, as I've noted recently, that Mia's life has settled in pretty nicely to a good routine.  This year was no exception.  After COVID, she's been back in school and at summer camp, and she loves it (we did all get COVID last summer, but it barely affected Mia, because she's super-tough!).  She comes home, watches television, gets therapy on the days she gets therapy, and sleeps.  After this school year, she has two years left, so we don't...

Today is the 19th anniversary of Mia's car accident, which damaged her brain and almost killed her.  Every year on this date, I write about the year just past, and today it's been a year since I updated the blog, which is now a new one because for some reason, I can't access the old one.  I wish I wrote more on this blog, but real life is just too much in the way these days.  Mia is doing fine, which is nice.  Things surrounding her are a bit less fine, but that's the way it is. I don't have a lot of information about her - things are moving along.  She's been doing fine in school, and we're always glad that she's able to go, see her friends, do a bit of learning, and spend some time out and about in the community.  She's a very social animal, and she always gets to school and yells out her classmates' names (she doesn't actually say hello to them, because that would be too easy, although her teachers are always trying to get her to do it!) a...