Pournelle Plans To Live Long and Prosper

Chaos Manor’s latest update about Jerry Pournelle’s recovery came from the author himself. (Jerry supplied the words; the text was posted by a digital amanuensis.)

Monday Dec. 25, I had a stroke.   I think my head is all right, and I am recovering.  Alas I used to be a touch typist and I am now learning to be a two finger typist.  At present I am a one finger typist.  Call it 1.1 finger, but after today’s therapy , maybe 1.2; I am learning. I just made the Spock sign.

Started a ramble to post, but it is easy with Windows 8 to have what you write vanish.  I will keep trying.

Please someone post in my blog that I am here and learning.  The Surface works but learning to use it and Outlook 13 after a stroke is hard enough and I am clumsy. But I am trying and think I will recover. But it takes time.

But I am coming back

Good news indeed!

4 thoughts on “Pournelle Plans To Live Long and Prosper

  1. I had planned to write about my Dad this month–and I will, soon! (because he was one of the original group of science fiction fans, but those uncounted (and of course, for many other reasons!))–but Mr. Pournelle’s post posits me to remember something I wasnt giing to write about:

    In my Dad’s very bad, last days, we were able to communicate, but it had to be by some kind of telepathy, or more likely, eye reading and recognition of facial tics and expressions…

    Maybe we had been a little intuitive, all along.

    My Pop, after having been hit by a car, was paralyzed completely from the neck down. He was just starting the regime of swallowing breath, to talk… So, the only other chance to “talk” was through the alphabet chart, where a patient’s eyes were supposed to direct you…

    But, my point here is, my dad was able to master whatever the doctors and nurses gave him. (Actually, somehow, he was starting to teach some of the ICU nurses Chinese, as they played his language tapes I had brought for him, and they otherwise, at times, would dance around, to make him smile. , as they made his morning bed.)

    Like Jerry, my Dad was a trained scientist, someone who would study languages for fun, and resd voluminously, a CUNY engineering professor…

    What I’m trying to say is, and maybe someone can pass this along, is that as annoyingly awful as the current state of things may be, Jerry’s tools to engage and conquer his challenges are in fine fettle, thank God–

    And in a couple of weeks time, it’s all gonna seem like a piece of cheese cake.

  2. Errr…um… ultimately, I think we’re all in the process of dying, but while we’re doing it we might as well enjoy to the utmost the fact that we’re still living, and that we _can_ enjoy that.

  3. James H. Burns:

    I worked in a stroke/traumatic brain injury rehab unit for five years ending in 2000. The tools for rehabilitation at the time, while not up to the standards of the Howard Families Clinic on Tertius Collony, or Beverly Crusher, Leonard McCoy, heck, even Stephen Franklin much less Simon Tam, are still greatly improved over the days when my paternal grandfather had his stroke in 1960, or even Robert Heinlein’s TIA in the late ’70s in Fiji. Add the intervening fourteen years for further improvement, well, we move ahead.

    Dr. Pournelle has my best wishes for his rehabilitation and recovery.

    And I’m sorry about your father. I lost my great-grandfather (the father of the grandfather mentioned above, both of whom I still have small-child memories) to the same cause in 1959. That part doesn’t improve.

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