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4/4/03 More Answered Prayer From:
Rob Payne <rob@everydayisprecious.com> Thank you for your continued prayer. After every thing we've tried over the last three years, we know that His love and your prayer will get us through this. Marcy may be showing a little more movement in her right hand - I can't be sure - I have not way to quantify it. But I am sure that I've felt less resistance, less stiffness in both hands and arms as I've done her range of motion exercises. And she is able to open her mouth a little wider when I brush her teeth! Also, there have been some changes in her digestive system (I'll spare you the details) that lead us to believe her body is detoxifying. Since getting her feeding tube, her food has been as toxin-free as we can make it, but we believe the disease makes her body poison itself - building up toxins - that seem to be coming out now. This is just what the new supplement "hype" says it will do. Tomorrow is the scheduled day for increasing the amounts and types of supplements taken. Please keep us uplifted in your prayers. We'll keep you up to date on the results! We've had a couple of bumps in our road the last week or so. The speech synthesizer I mentioned in our 3/16 email died on us - the screen stopped working. Since this was a loaner, we are working on getting one for us to keep at the same time this one is being repaired. Both processes take weeks. In the meantime, we're using a paper-based system to communicate. Basically, there are several pages of her most common concerns and phrases. Each page represents a category (like comfort, pets, kids.) Each page is numbered and each phrase is numbered. The cover page is an index of all other pages. So, we hold the cover page where Marcy can see it. We read off each number. When we read off the number of the page she wants, she blinks. We turn to that page (I cut tabs at the bottom of the pages so that we can turn to the page quickly) and read off the numbers of the phrases. When we read off the number of the phrase she wants, she blinks again, and we know what she needs. We have another page that has the alphabet separated on lines so she can use the same process to spell out words and phrases that are not on the printed list. It's all done on an Excel spreadsheet using the outline function, so it's easy to change. If this would be helpful for you or someone you know, you can download the spreadsheet as it is today (4/4/03.) Our neighbors continue to bring dinner every weeknight. This is such a big blessing with such wide variety of foods, we wanted to share it. Since it is impractical to have everyone come to our house for dinner, we've created a recipe section of this site called "Comfort Food." There are only a couple of recipes there now, but check it each time you come to the site, you may see something you want to try. Every day, in our prayers, we thank you for yours. Rob |
