As you’ll know if you’ve been following this blog and trying to keep up with Paul’s condition, he was released to go home on 20 July but it was only on 25 August that he finally regained connection to the Internet. Since then there have been a few hitches in sustaining his Internet connection, but those are essentially resolved now.
However, given all that he has gone through with the stroke and the resulting memory loss, he is having to start over, almost from scratch, to regain any facility with communicating by email and surfing the web. Since he hasn’t been able to send out much if any email, he reports that he has stopped receiving messages.
I understand that it is difficult to write continually to someone who doesn’t respond, but in this case I’d like to appeal to you to do so. This drop in incoming email leaves him feeling that people have forgotten him. My belief is that this phenomenon can be attributed to his friends not understanding that, though he can receive messages and read them, he has extreme difficulty initiating messages or even replying to those he receives. So my appeal to you is that you continue to copy him or direct messages to him (at Texas.Paule at Gmail.com) as you would have previously, and when you do write, please understand that he may not yet be able to reply to your message.
Since he has gotten back home, I have found it much more difficult to offer him technical help because of his loss of short term memory and his inability to describe accurately what he sees on the screen. He still has some difficulty expressing himself and of course finds that very frustrating. Yet he says that he’s not getting “any” email. I think that is probably an exaggeration, but I also suspect there is some truth to the observation that the volume of email he gets is off considerably.
He is able to receive calls by telephone or via Skype or Google Talk, and he welcomes those calls. Again though, when calling you should be aware that he moves more slowly than before, so please let the phone ring for an above average length of time to permit him time to get everything organized and pick up the phone. For either Skype or Google Talk, he’ll also have to don a headset which takes even longer. He usually naps between perhaps 1 and 3 p.m. so it would be best to avoid those hours if you decide to call.
Whether he will ever be able to be as prolific a communicator by email as he once was seems doubtful to me. However, he is still around and in the absence of this kind of contact with you, his friends, he feels cut off and isolated. Therefore let’s all resolve to revert our former behavior of copying him and writing to him as before even if we don’t hear back from him as we once would have. Perhaps over time, he will be able to develop his ability to reply or maybe not. At this point, I think it is impossible to predict.
Thank you.
