Happy Thanksgiving 2010

It's another happy Thanksgiving around our house. I'm thankful that Denise's tests since the last post continue to show no detectable cocci. She's been consistently healthy enough to get up in the mornings with us and help get us off to work/school and has been driving herself to volunteer in Jacob's & Gracie's classrooms at school every other week. And Denise looks tremendously better than she did Thanksgiving 2005 (scroll down to the Nov 25 2005 entry).
Her case was featured in the Fall 2010 issue of NEXT, Methodist Hospital of Arcadia's quarterly magazine. We got to do a photo shoot with her doctor from the CCU there and spend some time visiting with him (he's a much better-looking guy than me, but for some reason my picture got published instead of his).
Particularly exciting for Denise lately is that she has been able to get back into doing her artwork. Last year she tried working as a painter for a great family at my school that runs a prothetics business (Aesthetics Prosthetics... check out their incredibly life-like work), but Denise didn't feel her energy level, vision, and coordination were up to her expectations yet. Now over a year later, being able to again have a creative outlet doing her painting is another happy thing. Considering the issues with neurology, vision, and energy that she's had to deal with, being able to get back to painting is a major step in getting back to normal. Visit www.artsydd.com to see some of her work.