Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Full disclosure

In the interests of living up to the blog title, I leave you with this - my second son (known as Thud), the newly 8-year-old who was born with congenital heart defects, was recently diagnosed with scoliosis as well. Being my son he has decided that this is a much bigger thing than it actually is and that this explains why his handwriting is crap.


What is actually going on is that he really screwed up his body when he was building it in the first place. Not only did he get the Ikea instructions for his heart, he also got the Ikea instructions for his spine. His heart was missing a vital component (the tricuspid valve, causing tricuspid atresia), he got the two arteries leaving his heart the wrong way around (transposition of the great arteries), and when he was building his spine he forgot to put all of one piece in (hemivertebrae at L1 - NB despite that link my son is clearly not a bulldog). According to my research both of these problems occur at roughly the same point of foetal development, and neither of them are a) my fault or b) caused by my older son having measles at that point of my pregnancy. Sometimes, in my blue hours, I have my doubts about the second, but there's nothing I can do about it. See, mountain out of a molehill.

Also according to a few Internet friends this combination, together with his retractile testes (there is nothing that isn't on the Internet these days, I really am sorry Thud if you find this in the future!) are commonly found in people with genetic syndrome that hasn't yet been diagnosed. Great. Another thing to worry about. Although I have ruled out all the ones that include mental retardation because no-one could argue with me and his older brother the way he does if they had any kind of slow mental processes.

And the results are in...

...but I'm not supposed to say what they are unless you ask me. Go on, ask me!

What it means though is that this blog is going to m.orph into something different. I originally picked the blog name and URL for two purposes - it was meant to describe the process of learning and to describe my own slightly hystrionic self who can turn any small problem into a huge deal.

Sometime over the next month the learning process posts will be deleted (so the new crop of students can't easily access them, this is highly recommended by our tutor) and the more personal stuff will commence. There will probably be a lot of new learning stuff because I found the process of blogging much more useful than keeping my thoughts in my head, so don't say you weren't warned. That's if I don't manage to overcome my strong self-censor who deletes, re-reads, re-types and deletes again.

Oh, and at some point I need to go back and fix a minor issue that I don't like, the "Click for more" at the bottom of posts that don't need it. But that's something for another day. In other words, don't click for more no matter what it says beneath this.