Monday August 20

I got up at about 6 AM after another night where I more or less slept clear through the night.

Had the first outpatient bi-weekly rehabilitation session. For all the subsequent sessions, I’ve arranged to be picked up by a shuttle service run by the hospital so Susanne doesn’t need to take me. The first thing the therapist decided to work with was an electrical stimulation device. She needed to take quite a bit of time to get electrode pads affixed to the side of my calf in just the right location. The way this works is that pressure from my heel on a switch they put in my shoe triggers an electrical signal that stimulates the muscle. This is part of trying to restore the electrical impulse from my brain.

Began exploring ways to begin offering the “Three Tools of Healing” dramatic presentation to the public. This is the initial promotional flyer.

• I emailed the local reporter for the weekly newspaper the link to the blog and the promotional flyer to see if he’s interested in doing an article.
• I also sent an email to a listserve for the local Bahá’í community.
• I located two speaker’s bureaus in Cleveland that may well have an interest. One is run by the Jewish Community Federation, the other by the Mind Body Spirit Connection and is called the Complementary Alternative Medicine Speaker’s Bureau. I left a message for the person at the Jewish Community Federation.
• Many churches may also find my message inspiring (even though the source of the tools is the writings of the Baha’i Faith), because the talk is structured to be very inclusive as far as the spiritual inspiration….

Our friends Mark and Mara Fojas and their baby Liam Uluru came to visit and brought dinner. Mara is the daughter of Stephanie and Dustin Dornbrook, whose pictures I commented on from the Gathering Place in the post “Home 8/07-8/09”. We had a delightful time with them. Mark is about to begin medical school after working for 13 years in various areas of Information Technology. When we mentioned the challenges we’re finding in gaining access to the medical information we came to find out that Mark has extensively researched the new federal government patient privacy regulations that are being cited as the reason for the restrictions on access. He had some very interesting comments about how these regulations are being over applied. For instance he pointed out that the HIPAA acronym actually refers to Information Portability between health care facilities and not privacy…privacy was tacked on to the law at the end. My interest in this goes beyond my own personal circumstances. I see this restriction on information for patients as a barrier to people applying the fact-based spirit-guided path paradigm and plan to make contact with our congressperson, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, with my concerns about the matter. She serves on the House Ways and Means committee which oversees health care issues.

We attended a Baha’i 19-day Feast devotional and social gathering in Cleveland Heights. It was a wonderful time with about 15 participants. I shared a brief version of my story for the first time with a group of people and it felt very good to do so. People were clearly moved by what I said. One of the concerns that I had as the steroids were ramping down was that I would lose confidence in sharing my story. The frantic edge is now gone but the inner certainty and peace has remained…thank God!