Hello, All

I was thinking about all of you and how this blog reaches more than a hundred countries.  With all the strict and rigid rules governing access to planes and through airports and across borders, you’d think that maybe brain injury could be caught and held and detained and kept.

But no.

It reaches every tiny corner of our globe.  Like heartache, like cancer, like flu, like need, like hunger, like depression, like despair, like everything else.

It reaches.

And so we reach, too.  Out to our families and friends, our communities, our doctors.  Each other.

We reach.

Hello to you in India, to England and Sweden.  Sending warm thoughts to you in Canada and all the way to New Zealand and Australia.   Hola, Mexico and our Spanish-speaking friends.   Warm sentiments to you in Germany, in France, in South Korea and in every nation where brain injury waits snickering.

As I get older, more friends and family members now report their daily struggles.  Nagging pains and strange symptoms.  New meds and more doctor appointments.

I am aware, with each passing year, how extraordinary you are, we are.  That we have battled all of these symptoms in our daily lives for all of these years.

Most people will, hopefully, never fully get us.  We are all guilty, I suspect, of looking for understanding when we should simply be grateful for compassion and cheer and acceptance and help.

I’m so blessed to enjoy so many wonderful people in my life who, even after all these years, still come by to make sure my lightbulbs are working and that I’m not climbing up on ladders to change them.

Simple gifts of love.

Wishing you all simple gifts of love.  Of feeling like you are warmly cared for and thought of.  Know I am warmly thinking of all of you.  From here to every corner of our globe that this stupid injury has touched.

Hopefully you feel the touch of love and compassion, as well.  xo

Promise Kept

Hi, everyone!  I’m so thrilled and delighted to be able to share that finally….no, FINALLY!!!!! I have managed to narrate and produce the original, “I’ll Carry the Fork!  Recovering a Life After Brain Injury!” as an audio book.  Hooray  :)))))

As a brain injury survivor, most of you can imagine the potential roadblocks in narrating a book for audio.  Trust me, I hit every one of them.  🙂

It’s hard for me to read on any given day, to myself, without having to speak the words and into a microphone, no less.  Ha.  When you write a book, you don’t realize how many edits you make and mistakes and fixes….When I started to actually read the book aloud, it became quite clear that this would be a great, great challenge.

Not only did I have to work around my own challenges in reading and focusing and staying on each line and not going flat with my affect, but I also had to learn the recording program, learn the sound engineering tools and then try to record it when my cats weren’t awake because they always thought I was talking to them and came running in to talk back.  Ha.

I also wanted to ensure that survivors like me would be able to follow my cadence and pace so I took great care to read it in a very measured way.   Clear and easy.

I promised this option to the book many years ago when I must have been high.  LOL.  No, really.  I was determined to provide this option for those of us who simply cannot read any longer.  I made a promise and I was soooo determined to keep it.

Done!

There was always the option to hire a professional narrator to handle the task but I sure wanted to do this with you and for you.   We’ve all come so far together and it felt really terrific to imagine actually spending time with you and telling my story in-person.

This is a gigantic personal achievement for me.  One that has taken many years, starting with a friend and I recording terrible versions onto homemade CDs.  And now this  :)))))

For those of you interested, you can get the audio book for free with a free trial.  It’s available on Amazon, iTunes and Audible.  I think that, if you sign up for the free Audible trial membership and tell them it’s for this book, you can get the download free.  Hooray!!!

Anyway, excited to share.  Couldn’t wait to tell you.  I’m working on my other books now and it’s a new path for me.   Always a new path as we chisel out these lives of ours.  Always re-inventing, always trying new.   You and me.  Me and you.

Thanks for sharing my exciting news.  I couldn’t wait to share it.  Hope everyone is doing well.   Kara

https://www.amazon.com/Carry-Recovering-After-Brain-Injury/dp/B07G7GHGY6/ref=sr_1_1_twi_audd_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1534447367&sr=8-1&keywords=I%27ll+Carry+the+Fork