jessenoller.com

Let me start off by say­ing that while this post is largely not Python related although it is slightly related in the fact that I talk about the Python com­mu­nity later on. Largely this post is about my fam­ily and some of the trou­bles that we’ve been going through, and how it has affected me.

If you’re look­ing for a tech­ni­cal Python arti­cle then you should prob­a­bly move on. I real­ize that it has been awhile since I’ve been able to do a deep post on a pure Python topic; for that I apol­o­gize. This post talks a lot about com­mu­nity towards the end; so it may remain of interest.

I’ve been writ­ing, and re-writing this post in my head over and over again — some of it due to the fact that the prob­lems we’ve been deal­ing with are just not some­thing I’ve ever dealt with before, but also I didn’t quite know how to put things into words. Throw in a healthy dose of “1 month old induced sleep depri­va­tion” and you have a com­bi­na­tion for scram­bled brains and scat­tered thoughts.

Mostly, it is the emo­tional aspect — more impor­tantly I’ve been sit­ting here rewrit­ing this post over and over and over again because it is never easy for par­ents and it is espe­cially not easy for me, just because of who I am, to sit down and put to words the expe­ri­ences of the past month. My wife, Dusty has has orga­nized and posted her views on what’s hap­pened over on her blog — I encour­age you to go read those:

• “Wel­come AJ”
• “One of Many Hard Days”
• “The Diag­no­sis and mov­ing for­ward”
• “Updates”
• “God, Are you there?”
• “I make her smile”

She’s done an excel­lent job putting her thoughts down elo­quently — far bet­ter than I’ve man­aged. I don’t think I’ve stopped “work­ing” in any sense of the word — you get busy just liv­ing, you get busier with one child — with a sec­ond child (espe­cially an infant) — no one gets free time. Throw in a busy job at a startup, chair­ing PyCon, and a hand­ful of other things and I’m pretty happy to be sit­ting here cor­rect­ing a hor­ri­bly dic­tated blog post.

So, back­ing up — on June 2nd, we wel­comed Addi­son Joy to the world — she’s the sec­ond of our beau­ti­ful chil­dren. As many of you might know — or — you’ve read my wife’s posts — the pre­gancy was pretty hard on every­one involved, but espe­cially my wife. It was touch and go and that is stress­ful enough.

But, so, AJ was born — and at first, every­thing seemed to be fine. 10 fin­gers, 10 toes and poop­ing — that’s sort of what you hope for in a new­born. We took her home, she saw her pedi­a­tri­cian, and that was that.

Well, no. Around the time Addi­son was three weeks old (shortly before my first child’s birth­day) my wife Dusty started notic­ing that Addi­son was behav­ing erratically/oddly — and if you have any expe­ri­ence with infants, you’d know how hard it is to actu­ally deter­mine “odd” behav­ior. Almost every­thing they do is odd, down to tim­ing exactly the worst moment when to spit up on you (point of fact — it is after you’ve show­ered, and are walk­ing out the door).

In this case, the odd behav­ior my wife noticed was actu­ally a pat­tern — and that’s when you need to worry. You want con­sis­tency in cer­tain areas, you want to see con­tin­ual improve­ment, you want them to con­sis­tently eat, poop and sleep. How­ever, a pat­tern of odd move­ments tipped my wife (who is a fan­tas­tic ana­lyst) off that some­thing was not quite right.

What my wife found was that Addi­son for peri­ods of time any­where from 1–2 min­utes her eyes would slit and roll back and she would freeze up. The best way to describe it is it was almost as if she would just “check out” — as if some­one hit a power switch.

Her eyes rolled back and her body would go stiff — her breath­ing would go robotic. My wife didn’t want to scare any­one come off as the the crazy over­pro­tec­tive par­ent but it was hap­pen­ing more more fre­quently and it was hap­pen­ing in clus­ters. Basi­cally, Addi­son would have these spells in groups of 3 to 4 and she was hav­ing them more fre­quently than you’d care to imag­ine through the day and night.

As this pat­tern began to emerge and my lov­ing wife, the ana­lyst, started to see the trends — she started to dig around search and ended up find­ing a video on YouTube of exactly what we were see­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, the video matched what was hap­pen­ing — what we were both now see­ing that the pat­tern had become clear — and the video was of a small infant hav­ing seizures. Pat­terns, espe­cially hid­den ones (like the arrow in the Fedex logo) are very hard to un-see once you’ve seen them, and this was no dif­fer­ent. We knew some­thing was up.

She passed that video, and all of our sus­pi­cions to our pri­mary pedi­a­tri­cian — some­one from the old-school of pedi­atrics. Within an hour, he had already set us up with a rush appoint­ment at one of the best pedi­atric hos­pi­tals in the United States — Tufts Float­ing Hos­pi­tal for Chil­dren. Luck­ily, it is about an hour away from where we live.

Within a few days, we were sit­ting and talk­ing to some of the best child/infant neu­rol­o­gists in the area. No one was fool­ing around — the turn­around time to us iden­ti­fy­ing some­thing and us sit­ting in a room with at least two top notch neu­rol­o­gists was amazing.

The staff has been amaz­ing: from our first visit they have been kind, cour­te­ous, they have helped us man­age our four year old Abby who had to come along for the ride. They answered all of our ques­tions, encour­aged us to get sec­ond opin­ions, etc. The first meet­ing we had with them, they looked us flat in the eyes and said “you’re not leav­ing here with­out a plan”. God help me, I could have hugged them at that point.

They watched some of the videos of the episodes my wife had cap­tured on her iPhone — we’d been instructed to record as much as pos­si­ble. We dis­cussed the episodes and their “pre­sen­ta­tion” (what they look like, how Addi­son moves dur­ing them, which way do the eyes roll back, etc) and so on.

Then, in a flash, it was off to the EEG — this is where you, as a par­ent, feel largely like a use­less appendage. They take your 4 week old daugh­ter and stick lit­tle elec­trodes to her head and watch the elec­tri­cal impulses in her brain fire. Shortly after the EEG my wife indi­cated to me that she knew they had seen some­thing but they were being rel­a­tively tightlipped — they imme­di­ately sent us off to another depart­ment to get a sono­gram of Addi­son head. A sono­gram is essen­tially an ultra­sound — they were look­ing for phys­i­cal abnor­mal­i­ties, cal­cium deposits, water on the brain and tumors. Luck­ily, the sono­gram came up clean.

Shortly after the sono­gram the team of doc­tors that we been work­ing with came in and told us flat-out that the EEG had been abnor­mal. What this means is that they noticed dis­tinct abnor­mal elec­tri­cal behav­ior in both sides of Addison’s frontal lobe. Based on this, they would imme­di­ately assume she was hav­ing seizure activ­ity and that epilepsy was a very real pos­si­bil­ity. There­fore in order to get the sit­u­a­tion under con­trol we would imme­di­ately put Addi­son on to a drug to help con­trol seizures — start­ing with a small dose, and work­ing our way up until the seizures stopped.

Now when deal­ing with epilepsy in infants there are only two real drugs that doc­tors are will­ing to rec­om­mend the first is phe­no­bar­bi­tal, which has some pretty awful side effects (and a tran­quil­iz­ing affect on the infant), such as caus­ing some seri­ous liver prob­lems, etc. The good news is that phe­no­bar­bi­tal has about 150 years of use behind it — doc­tors know it pretty well, and it has known to help with epilepsy quite well. The prob­lem is the side effects — well, Dusty and I agreed the side effects were too much.

The sec­ond drug is Kep­pra — this one is not as old as phe­no­bar­bi­tal — but is also known to work on infants with seizures. The side effects on this one are less, but not entirely non-existent — one of the nas­tier ones is crank­i­ness from the infant. Addi­son is a pretty chilled out baby and so giv­ing her some­thing that would make her angry all the time wasn’t some­thing we were look­ing for­ward to, but we went down that road.

So the plan was this: in about two weeks, bring Addi­son back for a 24 hour EEG so they could cap­ture more data and record her on video for that time, so they would have as much data as they could com­pile. The fol­low­ing week would be an MRI so they could look deeply into things to ver­ify every­thing was struc­turally sound

From the time we left the hos­pi­tal, through­out the week­end, etc — the staff and doc­tors were email­ing us, call­ing us and check­ing in on us. They were atten­tive, kind and mak­ing sure every­thing was going ok with Addi­son as we steadily increased her dosage of the drug — .2 mL, .4 mL — to even­tu­ally .6 mL.

As the hours passed — you could actu­ally see the episodes chang­ing — they were get­ting longer, but less “twitchy” — the clus­ters were shorter/different. It crazy — you could actu­ally see her body’s reac­tion in real-time. Unfor­tu­nately, we could also expe­ri­ence her atti­tude chang­ing in real-time as well.

So here we are, two par­ents — two kids. I’ve got a full time job (and full time vol­un­teer work on the side) and my wife had just been set­tling down to being the best damned stay at home mom you’ve ever seen. We’re run­ning on lit­tle to no sleep and bam. A bus slams into us. Epilepsy. Our beau­ti­ful new­born baby girl prob­a­bly has a form of epilepsy.

What did we do? Did we cause this? Your fears, doubts and every lit­tle thing comes rush­ing into this men­tal void left by the explo­sion of this new reality.

And so there we are — drug­ging a new­born in hopes to kind of get these things under con­trol and hop­ing for the best. As a dad, the typ­i­cal thing you want to do — your typ­i­cal guy response — is to fix the prob­lem. You have to have an answer — any answer.

You want to fix your help­less daugh­ter sit­ting there look­ing off into space.

That’s not how it works though. You have to sit there and watch, and wait. You have to keep your poker face on when the doc­tors tell you your kid could have an incur­able dis­ease — or some­thing she could grow out of in a few months — no one knows, and it is impos­si­ble to tell in chil­dren this young.

It is not the prob­lem that kills you inside — it is the uncer­tainty — it is the not know­ing and the feel­ing help­less to do any­thing. Through­out all of this, my wife — Dusty — has been my hero. She’s pushed through, asked all the right ques­tions, pushed the doc­tors — and me — to do bet­ter, answer more, to step up and beyond.

The fol­low­ing week, the MRI was shown to be clean — another exhale of breath — that means no surgery (but also, no “easy answer”) — go home, keep her on the Kep­pra, the 24 hour EEG is com­ing up. Watch and wait.

Then, the Wednes­day I finally decide to scrape my body out of bed at 5:30 in the morn­ing (this is really hard with new­born) and go to Yoga, things go side­ways. While I’m in yoga — my cell­phone is shut off (it doesn’t work well in the heat), and it is quiet. Lit­tle did I know, that while I was there, my wife was in the process of dial­ing 9–1-1 — Addi­son had fallen into a grand mal seizure, and she could not pull Addi­son from it/snap her out of it. The seizure went on for over 8 min­utes. Warn­ing signs.

By the time I was out of class I had a mail­box of mes­sages and a lot of guilt — an hour had passed since my two daugh­ters and wife had been taken via ambu­lance to a local hos­pi­tal in their paja­mas. The plan was to trans­fer Addi­son to Tufts in Boston ASAP. I had some catch­ing up to do, and some apolo­gies to make. I still don’t feel right think­ing about it — I let my fam­ily down, while I was off work­ing out.

In the ambu­lance, the para­medics were able to snap Addi­son out of it, which was good news. Fast for­ward through Addi­son being trans­ferred to tufts all by her­self (fam­ily can­not travel in the trans­ports if they have chil­dren — and I had yet to show up to the hos­pi­tal) and me dri­ving pretty ille­gally to come and get my wife and Abby and shoot down­town to see if we could beat Addi­son get­ting here.

Before this rush to the hos­pi­tal visit — the diag­no­sis had been “gen­eral non-specific seizures” — doctor-speak for “she’s too small for us to pin­point it, but some­thing ain’t right”. Then, here we are — rushed in, a video cam­era pointed at my 5 week old daughter’s head, elec­trodes cemeted onto her head, rolling off the bed in a bun­dle to the EEG machine, an IV plugged into her foot.

Before we could say boo; they immeditely dou­bled the dose of the Kep­pra she had been on (from .6 mL to 1.2 mL) in hopes to bring the episodes under con­trol. That started the clock — the first day there, my wife and I and Abby were there most of the day. I sent them home to get food, and a change of clothes for me — I’d be pulling the overnight shift — and so it went for the next 48 hours.

Sleep­ing two nights in a hos­pi­tal cot with your new­born hooked up to crazy things next to you is pretty much a weird experience.

And herein lies the rub; they checked the first 24 hours of the EEG pretty quickly, and it came back up clean. They had video of Addi­son hav­ing the episodes, but they were not appear­ing on the EEG. Every­one pretty much assumed that the Kep­pra was keep­ing things under con­trol — so for the sec­ond 24 hours — they took her off the Kep­pra, but kept record­ing. The prob­lem of course, is that Kep­pra takes days to flush from your system.

So, another set of clean EEGs — this has all of us flum­moxed — every­one there had video and had seen Addi­son slip­ping into these episodes. But with­out the EEG data to back it, there was noth­ing solid to poke at. It gets more frus­trat­ing when what­ever small, painful answer you had is clouded over because they can’t prove it (or even dis­prove it).

And so, they sent us home — off the Kep­pra, with Addi­son hooked up to all the elec­trodes cemented to her head, and a portable EEG machine record­ing the entire time, like a lit­tle black box. They removed that last Mon­day. Then last thurs­day, she was back in for another EEG that came up clean. The catch? They have video of her hav­ing the episodes right on cam­era while the EEG shows she’s not asleep/out to lunch, just “frozen”.

And now, here we are — diag­nosed with a “seizure dis­or­der” — we’re no closer to an answer than we were before. it is hard — with chil­dren this young, it is actu­ally really dif­fi­cult to get reli­able tests from them, and some of the other tests they can do — such as spinal taps — could cause more harm to her than good. We’re in “wait and test more mode”. Babies’ brains and ner­vous sys­tem mature/change on a weekly basis  - so what might be true this week, may not be true the next. It makes it very, very hard to diag­nose prob­lems unless they’re glar­ingly obvious.

Last week we involved early inter­ven­tion which is actu­ally a gov­ern­ment pro­gram that will come and help out your child and help you with cop­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing issues and mak­ing sure you know she’s hit­ting all of her devel­op­men­tal milestones.

They did their ini­tial eval­u­a­tion — which, again, given Addison’s early age means there’s a lot of fudge in the num­bers however, early inter­ven­tion found that Addi­son is 30% behind the aver­age on three of the key mile­stones (devel­op­ment stages). All of the mile­stones she is behind on hap­pen to be ones con­trolled largely by the frontal lobe — where we have seen abnor­mal activ­ity. Her phys­i­cal mile­stones are on tar­get — the oth­ers, well — 30% behind.

Now — that could be noth­ing. Babies develop at dif­fer­ent rates all the time, Addi­son could just be slower devel­op­ing in those three areas; how­ever this cou­pled with the episodes she’s been hav­ing could indi­cate a prob­lem in her frontal lobe which may not fully present itself until she’s older.

This also means a lot of work — we have to be a lot more focused on these milestones/stages than most par­ents. Talk, play music — things you already do as a par­ent with infants, but now we have to watch her reac­tions (with the help of doc­tors and nurses) like a hawk. We have to make sure she does not halt devel­op­ing, and does not in fact go back­wards in any way.

We are in for reg­u­lar vis­its from nurses, reg­u­lar vis­its (EEGs) with the Neu­rol­o­gists so that they can make sure she hasn’t dras­ti­cally changed. Right now, they can’t put her back on the anti-seizure med­ica­tion, with­out proof on the EEG, even with video and hands on proof of the episodes, hav­ing her on the med­ica­tion with­out the EEG data to solidly back an epilepsy diag­noses could harm her more than help her — even if we know it does help the episodes she is hav­ing now.

So here we sit — every­one know­ing — from her pedi­a­tri­cian, to the neu­rol­o­gists, to the nurses, that some­thing is wrong. We can’t ask Addi­son what’s wrong, what she’s feel­ing, or any­thing else. All we get to work on are facial expres­sions and cry­ing. There’s noth­ing you can do as a par­ent — we have to sit and watch her light switch shut off and her tiny hands shake, there’s no drugs, there’s noth­ing but test­ing, and wait­ing, and watching.

It brings us to an unpleas­ant place — a long road of doc­tor vis­its, not know­ing, wait­ing and hop­ing. Hour long trips into the city to the hos­pi­tal through Boston’s lovely traf­fic. No answers, just neg­a­tive ones — “it is not x, or y — right now”. There’s noth­ing proac­tive to be done — only reac­tionary. Watch and wait and react. If things get bet­ter — we rejoice, if things get worse, we react. Doc­tor visit after doc­tor visit, EEG after EEG.

So the rea­son I’m writ­ing this post kind of a part cathar­sis and part update to a lot of friends I, and my fam­ily have out there. We’re lucky — I have a great job I love, we have great med­ical insur­ance and the best hos­pi­tals in the coun­try nearby. We have a lot of things going for us.

Despite that, it is still try­ing. Men­tally, phys­i­cally — time and atten­tion — finan­cially. It is not easy — but many peo­ple have it worse.

Now, if you’ve been fol­low­ing me on twit­ter, or google+ — much of this comes as no sur­prise to you. Many of you — well, most of you — are mem­bers of the Python com­mu­nity, the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion, you help with PyCon — some­how, I, or my fam­ily know you.

And we’ve been touched by you.

Some­thing I didn’t count on, bar­ing my soul on twit­ter, or google+, or Face­book was the over­whelm­ing and hum­bling sup­port my fam­ily and I would receive from all of you. The well wishes, the emails — cards from all over the world wish­ing us well and offer­ing us your hopes and prayers.

Some of you may have met me — almost none of you have met my wife and fam­ily — and yet the out­pour­ing of sup­port from the Python com­mu­nity has hum­bled me and brought me to my knees in thanks. It brings tears to my eyes just think­ing about the gen­eros­ity that has been bestowed on us by peo­ple inside of this com­mu­nity. Some­thing as small as a card — a box of crayons and a col­or­ing book for my old­est daugh­ter — it has helped my fam­ily and I and touched us in a way I don’t think we’ve ever been touched.

It is amaz­ing to me that I can admit to hurt­ing or going through some­thing like this and peo­ple all over the world will imme­di­ately start send­ing the resources on where to look for infor­ma­tion or who to talk to or spe­cial­ists that they know, con­tact infor­ma­tion for fam­ily mem­bers that they know who have expe­ri­ence with epilepsy or seizures.

It has been amaz­ing to me the amount of sup­port that I’ve got­ten from a com­mu­nity that’s based on a pro­gram­ming lan­guage; we are all engi­neers and it is not some­thing that you’d nec­es­sar­ily expect.

Except for the fact that at the end of they we are all humans and as God as my wit­ness I have to say that all of you Python hack­ers, and friends — both inter­net and in per­son are the best, most touch­ing human peo­ple I’ve ever had the lux­ury of deal­ing with in my entire life.

I’ve had the honor of stand­ing up on stage at PyCon address­ing 1300 Python hack­ers and that was stun­ning and hum­bling in and of itself — but to have peo­ple who you mainly talk to on the Inter­net and pri­mar­ily through mail­ing lists and code, twit­ter and google — who in one moment might be argu­ing with you vio­lently about some­thing about pack­ag­ing, test syn­tax or con­cur­rency — to have those same peo­ple turn around and lift your fam­ily up in your time of need — it is beyond words. This Python com­mu­nity — our com­mu­nity — is some­thing to be cherished.

There have been sev­eral occa­sions where out of sight of my fam­ily and the rest the world I’ve cried because of what the com­mu­nity has done for us in how much it has sup­ported us. Our friends, this com­mu­nity, our fam­ily — I can’t describe it.

Some­thing as small as get­ting a pack­age in the mail that has a cou­ple of stuffed ani­mals for my old­est daugh­ters — that just bright­ens thier day, a card wish­ing us well or an email or tweet to my wife — it makes the day brighter. In the past month those bright days have been rough and very hard to make as a father and it has been hard to get up in the morn­ing in the face of “ship this code, ship this con­fer­ence, fig­ure out what’s wrong with your daugh­ter, keep the boat afloat”. All of the sup­port we have got­ten has helped prop me, and my fam­ily, up. It has helped us make what could have been crush­ing days not so dark.

We don’t have fam­ily in the area (at least none remotely close) and it has been amaz­ing hav­ing peo­ple reach out to you from com­pletely dif­fer­ent coun­tries when your next door neigh­bor doesn’t even know some­thing is going on.

It is amaz­ing, it is hum­bling — and I just want to say thank you from the deep­est part of my heart. There might be more tough times com­ing up ahead — I don’t know — but it is my job as a father to get up every­day put on that game face and ship that code, fix those bugs, and ship a con­fer­ence, make money and be a dad — it is my job as a father to do the impos­si­ble every­day because that is what I do.

Its my wife’s job to get up, put on a game face and do the impos­si­ble every­day, she is my hero, she doesn’t “get” to go to work, a small vaca­tion I get every day. She is in the fray all day, every day, doing the impossible.

The impos­si­ble is already hard enough — rais­ing chil­dren, hold­ing down a full time job and jug­gling a hun­dred other things — things par­ents do every day is hard enough but it is our job as par­ents and our duty to stand up straight and do every­thing that we can for our chil­dren.
In the case of our child — it is our job to do the best damn job that we pos­si­bly can, give her the best care, the most love, and to hope and pray that every­thing will come out all right.

And that’s the odd thing through­out all of this deep down inside — if you ask my wife — I’m a starry eyes opti­mist, for exam­ple I believe that every­one no mat­ter who they are or their atti­tude or back­ground can be a con­trib­u­tor to not just Python — but its com­mu­nity and vibrancy as well. I believe that human beings are intrin­si­cally good crea­tures — I believe that we as peo­ple and as humans are capa­ble of doing the impos­si­ble and the incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult every sin­gle day.

Being an opti­mist I have to look at the sit­u­a­tion with my daugh­ter Addi­son and tell myself that it will be okay. I have to keep telling myself this time and time again because I have to rein­force it in my head that that every­thing is going to be okay — you know she’s still a fan­tas­tic baby, she still sleep­ing large chunks of the night, she’s eat­ing, she inter­acts with us.

She’s a great baby and daugh­ter — both my daugh­ters are great and amaz­ing — just every so often she checks out. It is a very real pos­si­bil­ity that in three months Addi­son could grow out of this and all this fright and energy was “for noth­ing” — it is also a very real pos­si­bil­ity that in three months things could get fan­tas­ti­cally worse.

It is pos­si­ble it is just due to the hard preg­nancy that my wife had with the hos­pi­tal stays and every­thing else and that Addi­son is just catch­ing up devel­op­men­tally to things that she should’ve had when she was born and now chalk it up to “weird baby things”

I have to keep telling myself that she is going to grow out of it, that she is just going to be fine, and you know some part of me when sit­ting in a dark room might whis­per to me that I’m lying to myself that it is not going to be okay and things are only going to get worse but I know that’s not the case.

Par­ents go through things every day that are much, much worse than what my wife and I have gone through. No one wants to go through that we’ve gone through but other par­ents go through much worse and they adapt and they raise some of the best chil­dren that you’ve ever seen. Some of my heroes have raised chil­dren with prob­lems such as epilepsy or autism and their chil­dren are amaz­ing, much more amaz­ing than me. So despite what Addi­son may or may not have, despite not know­ing and just hav­ing to sit back and watch as some­thing hap­pens that I have no power over — despite all that, I know things will be okay.

Because I know as a par­ent and as a human, it is my job to get up every day and do the impos­si­ble. It is my job as a par­ent to raise the best chil­dren — not per­fect chil­dren — the best chil­dren that I can and do right by them. It is my job to teach them, to love them and do every­thing in my power to either heal them or help them cope with what­ever may be wrong. It is hard, but it is not impos­si­ble — but the impos­si­ble is our job.

Reach out to those you know are hurt­ing, or are scared — or heck, peo­ple with one month olds that keep them up all night — wish them well, send them a card, or an email. Even if you only know them through twit­ter, python or some­thing else — maybe they’re a ker­nel hacker, maybe they’re some­one work­ing on the next big deploy­ment tool — it doesn’t mat­ter who they are or what they’re doing Engi­neers are Humans (as Ned so aptly put it) — and all of those peo­ple try­ing to achieve, and fight the impos­si­ble are even more than that.

So while some part of me is scared, is fright­ened, is angry — that’s not the part that I can lis­ten to at all — that’s the part that’s been pushed into the darker cor­ner of my brain not only because of my opti­mism that’s baked into my brain but also thanks to the sup­port of our friends both inside of, and out­side of the Python Com­mu­nity and our family.

Because of the sup­port, because of the well wishes, because of the kind words because of every­thing that’s been done for us, on behalf of us, and because we can do the impossible.

Because of all this I know everything’s going to be okay.

Thank you. From my fam­ily, and the bot­tom of my heart.

 

p.s. There are many fam­i­lies out there — prob­a­bly peo­ple you know — who have chil­dren with issues, or who are strug­gling with issues such as these who are much, much worse off than my wife and I. My fam­ily, while going through this, is very lucky. We’ve been blessed with won­der­ful friends, this com­mu­nity and our fam­ily. I encour­age you again to look around and see those peo­ple who are much more deserv­ing than per­haps I, or my fam­ily is, and to help them. Even if it’s just a card; every­thing helps.

 

 

Let me start off by say­ing that while this post is largely not Python related although it is slightly related in the fact that I talk about the Python com­mu­nity...