Love, waiting to be shown.

Well, it looks like Brian's Mom just has more waiting to do on the cause of her leg paralysis while her MRI is analyzed. And that's the name of that tune. You can't rush science, especially not when it's combined with art, which is what I expect MRI analysis is.

We'll all be watching and rooting for her, that goes without saying.

Speaking of Brian and of lending support, Brian posted a message in the newsgroup rec.art.comics.strips, my daily internet hangout, with a link to this weblog, so a lot of "virtual friends" who didn't know before about my deafness and the implant surgery do now... and I am grateful to him for doing so.

While I never actively hid the situation from my r.a.c.s buddies, I didn't call attention to it either. I had been gossiping, wisecracking, analyzing comics, arguing, and having a lot of fun with those guys for years now. I didn't want anyone's perceptions of me to change. I didn't want people, when they opened up a post from me, to think "ohronniecatthedeafone". I didn't want one of my worthy ideological opponents, in the middle of some feisty debate, to be thinking, "She probably only has half her facts straight anyway. She can't hear the TV or radio. And aren't deaf people, well, on average not as bright as the general population?"

(One of a number of misconceptions about the deaf that turn up in surveys.)

But with the possibility of regaining my hearing after less than a year of this roller coaster (can you believe it?) most of my fears seem moot. So when Brian mentioned in an email that he'd thought about posting a link but had not in order to "respect my limits" (bless him, he has good instincts, just as other r.a.c.s people who read the blog have), I felt it was time to thank him and suggest I'd be ok with that.

In fact I encouraged him... with the surgery so close I want those good, smart, funny people rooting for me. And, not a bit to my surprise, they are.

I wish there were more adequate words to describe what expressions of support do for you, mentally and spiritually. In a post thanking my newsgroup friends, I described every message of support as feeling like "someone has just thrown you another thread to add to your lifeline".

I just finished reading Christopher Reeve's autobiography "Still Me" and he writes about how, immediately following his accident, so many people rushed to the hospital at the University of Virginia... people he would not have expected, sailing buddies, old friends he hadn't seen in years, people he didn't realize he was important to. He talks of how the medical staff offered their own apartments to these out-of-towners, how some of his visitors took care of his young son, Will, for hours and hours so that his wife, Dana, would be free to focus on him.

"I began to understand," he writes, "that there's so much love around -- love, waiting to be shown."

ronnie