#which is p plausible considering the size of his found family | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

passern · 3 years

Text

DECLARATION OF LAWSUIT

Wed. Oct. 19, 2020 10:10am

THE PRESIDENT OF DEFENSE COUNCIL FOR THE STATE OF NEBRASKA IN 2009 TOLD ME THERE IS PLAUSIBLE CASE FOR A LAWSUIT HERE. “GET AN OUT OF STATE ATTORNEY AND SUE THEM. I DON’T WANT TO. I LIVE HERE. YOU WILL WIN.”

AT PRESENT, I HAVE NO WHERE-WITH-ALL TO GATHER THE REST OF THE NEEDED INFORMATION TO ADVANCE.

THERE IS A STUBBORN ENTITY THAT IS A DISCOURAGING NUISANCE. IT IS MAKING THE COMMUNICATIONS OF INTERAREA LIVING IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO COMPILE AND PRESENT ALL THE NEEDED CASE MATERIAL BEFORE THE PROPER MAGISTRATE.

THE FACTS ARE DEFINITIVE. THE DOCUMENTED CONTRACTS ARE FALSIFIED | NOT UNISON AND NOT NEAR THE CONTENT MEANING OF THE ORIGINAL.

IF: “ANY AND ALL ENTRIES BETWEEN MR.PASSERIN AND THE OFFICER—BETWEEN THE MOMENT HE WAS TOLD TO TALK TO THEM BY THE THIRD PARTY AND THE OFFICER AND THE START OF TRIAL—WERE CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID TO PROSECUTE ANYONE BUT HIMSELF”

● THERE WAS NO SLANDER

● NO CHARACTER DEFAMATION

● NO COOPERATING FURTHER WITH THE POLICE IN ANY REGARDS

IF THERE IS ANY INFORMATION OR PROF THEREOF THAT INDICATES OTHERWISE, THEN THE ABOVE TERMS HAVE NOT BEEN MET. THIS NEEDS ADDRESSED. NEBRASKA HAS BEEN CONTACTED. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN CONTACTED. MONTGOMERY COUNTY DETECTIVES AND ATTORNEY HAVE NOT, THIS HAS BEEN DIFFICULT TO ADDRESS FOR SOME REASON.

NOT THE NEBRASKA POLICE FORCE, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, THE PENNSYLVANIA POLICE FORCE, CALIFORNIA OF ANY OTHER ENTITY SHOULD BE ABLE TO HARRAS OR GIVE MR. PASSERIN GRIEF OVER THIS INCIDENT.

HAVE YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW BEEN AFFECTED BY THE ENCLOSED INFORMATION? ARE YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW ABLE OR WILLING TO PARTICIPATE IN A LAWSUIT?

REGARDS,

JASON PASSERIN

[email protected]

In 1999 I started a landscaping company. I did alright with it. About three years before I learned how to bid jobs and get permits, fuel prices went up and I took three big losses. Standing at a fuel pump at a Hess station, the price was $2.84 and rising strong. It was then that I decided to write termination letters to my customers and close down to narrow down the field of work I offered.

California’s atmosphere was nice at first, though it was a disaster from the start. It is not as friendly as it feels nice to be there. Soon the nice feeling wore off and was replaced with a sort of violent ignorance. The opposite of selflessness was replaced with stubborn possession. The wrong mood. The wrong atmosphere. There is some more in my post script.

Since then I moved here, back to California and then here again. Before my recent arrival here, I had been incarcerated at Pleasant Valley. During all the chaos during 2013 I was pulled over with a loaded pistol while on probation. At that moment I was waiting to find my ex-landlord to return it to. Living off the grid most of the time without something to scare away the animals was not a good idea. I had almost been eaten on more than one account.

In California in 2006, my first job was to clear a plot of land to the land owners request and install a fence. One rainy morning I was packing the truck. I felt something in the wind that told me to bring my rifle or I would be eaten alive. The rifle would have been one more heavy item on top of the materials that I would then have to pack to the site in the rain when I got there, so I left it. Soon after we started on the fence line a guest appeared.

A very large mountain cat, crouched and stalking to pounce about ten yards away helped me make my mind up. If ever I leave the pavement with no other way of warding off animals, I would never leave a firearm behind again.

When I returned to Eureka from Pleasant Valley, I had three years on probation. Most of which I stayed in the city limits so as not to wander off and lose track of time. I was able to stay in a somewhat nice halfway home for a few months with my rent paid by probation. It was not easy to find work, even with my resume. People would look at it and say I would hire you, but I can’t. So I spent the rest of the time homeless and left as soon as I was allowed.

If the court house does not open, I won’t be able to pass a background check. I have a failure to appear that was not cleared up before the Coronavirus closed everything. Not being able to pass a background check, I can’t get a job.

My mother was struggling with her home and I wanted to see if I could help her. I got a loan for her to keep and repair the house, but she turned it down. It would have left enough afterwards to make the payments for a year or two without being out of pocket. It then could have been placed up for sale at full value. She must not have been that bad off.

The entire year of 2012 to 2013 I was being threatened, my mother’s life was being threatened. Seemed like a phone hacker with an impressive PA system and forgist impersonator. Many threats along the lines of “We are going to kill your mother. We have impostered her long enough to have taken most of her finances. She will lose her home. Angel has cut her finger off that had her mom’s ring is on while she lay dead in the mourg and is flaunting it around, call her and see.”

I called her to see. Mom said she would send me the ring in question. That was odd. It was a family heirloom to her. She would not take it off her hand let alone put it in the mail. Right away I thought it was not my mother on the other end of the phone. A ring arrived. It was not the ring from the conversation. It looked like trouble. I threw it away over my shoulder in the cabin I stood in that moment and did not look back. At that moment I figured her for the imposter. The imposter that I and she had been threatened with that year.

Somewhere I heard this ring was stolen. There was a lot of “stolen jewelry” turning up around there. Some of the same jewelry that hung around the neck of my grandmother I used to teeth on as a young person, from my mother’s jewelry box. 24k Italian gold locket, two necklaces, both with my teeth marks still in them. I kept those in my property. When I got to my property to look, they had been replaced with something different.

(Remember .... told me that some “stank hoe” was sizing up your jewelry with ...... and jumped out your bedroom window with some of it. You were not the only one. Later that year I showed up at your place to show you a bunch of jewelry to look through to see if you could identify any of it. I found five pieces of my grandmother’s jewelry from my mom’s collection in it. My favorite pieces. Last seen next to a safe that went missing with $120,000.00 in it. Soon after, I returned the stuff to question all the residents at the same time.)

I am learning to type and am optimistic that the computer may be a field of study for me in the future. That is good considering my health is not always going to be the best.

My life has not been near what I am used to. I was counting the days to get here to clean and remove any and all trace evidence of 2012 to 2013. The most offensive and uninteresting years of my life. I still feel victimized from it. Not ever do I desire to live like that again. People, places and things, my work is laid out before me. Everything I laid on, laid with someone on, and or wore all had to get thrown out. I even ripped up the carpet and scrubbed the walls. If I could have ripped out the drywall just in case, I would have. Then put all of it in a pile and set it on fire.

I have heard rumors out here that when I got arrested in Nebraska the police and some unnamed female of Paul Hume or with P. Hume ID did not follow their word. Looking through my old files I found enough plausible documentation to present a lawsuit towards Kearney & Lincoln County Nebraska.

Before I left California in 07’ my neighbor Kim from Swayback told me: “You are going to get pulled over. Just do as they tell you when they reach out to you and you won’t lose anything. You might not go to jail.”

Entering a construction zone near Kearney Ne., I almost get run off the road by an older sedan going ten miles over the speed limit with something leering from the taillights. Ahead of this were two state troopers. As the sedan approached the construction zone the state troopers noted it was speeding. I saw the one start his car and put it in drive. He did not take his eyes off the car, until it cut me off, depressed the brake, the brake-lights came on and the leer from the taillights reached my rental truck. It was odd at that moment since I was not speeding that they took their focus off them to look at me. The officer would not break eye contact from me from that moment forward.

They pulled me over. Standing in front of Officer Frye 8795 or 8973 I noticed he heard the same thing I heard. He says: “Just do as that female told you. Make something up. I won’t hold you or anyone to it. I will honor what that female is telling you and let you go in five minutes.” The moment he acknowledged the female Paul Hume’s voice, he acknowledged taking part in an orchestrated, organized crime act—Not what I ever wanted for myself in any regards.

The female sounded off a lot. I have never heard anything like that before. So clear and direct. Like a laser beam. I heard her say “Lie, make something up, be creative. They won’t hold you to it. Just keep them talking for ten minutes and they will let you go. I need cover for...” It became a little difficult to hear the rest: “We are sanctioned to... Please ignore... We do this all the time...” I never heard any speech of communication without seeing someone’s lips move.

The officer was not all the way honest about his intentions. However, in my paperwork appeared “Any and all information obtained is null and void at possible fault of yours and becomes useless except against you only if you stop cooperating, run or turn yourself in. You may face a stronger penalty” (I have seen in my hand at one time, four duplicates of this document. None of them are the same in content). I knew how to manage this situation at this moment. Just run up their expenses and man hours, then burn them leaving them an inept non-witness with nothing to use towards anyone but me, as described.

Nothing I said or did between my arrest and start of trial was valid in any court of law. Somewhere that seems not to be so to someone. Perhaps a criminal, a cop or both that can not decide which to make of their involvement, an arrest, a cover up or both. There is a leek of faulted information. There is a third party that was using every bit of my actions as research on something that I don’t want to declare; separation of...names, street names, people, tunnels, bridges, it all is relevant.

In my papers was a close, not accurate version of that paper. None of the copies of that document were exact in wording of content, not even close. It did not contain what my original contained. I highlighted the areas of error and had it notarized. Then sent it to the county attorney in Lincoln Ne., with my informal notice of intent to bring suit. Failure to supply unison copied documentation, failure to follow their own stipulations, and slander. The Head of the Defense Council at the time, my attorney, told me there was a lawsuit here, but to find an out of state attorney he had had to live there. I did not follow through for suing Nebraska for the time served after my exonerated sentence.

There was a lawsuit in the Puget Sound for $19 million against the Fed. I think this one is worth $21-29 MILLION for some reason—similarities. If all the people involved were not so interested in harming each other. I would have already had some progress.

Regards,

JASON PASSERIN

[email protected]

P.S. This is a postscript I sent to Cynthia, my neighbor and one of the first persons I met upon my arrival in Mad River, Ca.

P.S. Do you remember in June of 07’ on a Sunday afternoon? You and Greg pulled up in the Suburban. Woody and I were outside loading the truck. It sounded like a gunshot. Then something like a mountain lion—almost but not—crying in the distance. Almost two full months in August I was forced off the road leaving the rodeo. I woke up part way with Joe over me holding a bottle of Lord Calvert as if he were pouring it down my throat; eyewitness told me similar. One week later a boxer and his three female companions ran off the road in the same spot. I think they hit the lake instead of the tree like Danielle, Kim and I. I started to feel an unnatural closeness to him and someone’s mom that week. Those woods out there can be strange. Take care out there. It is good to know you both. Thanks for the hospitality.

I used to live in Ohio. An at one time friend came to my home when I was not there. Asked me to do something that I should not have. I heard in his voice “bad news” and I ignored it. I lost my house that week. That was in 99’. I don’t think I have seen him much if at all since. Don’t very much want to. Last I considered him my friend. About a year before that I got pulled over with him in the back seat of my car, sounding off to something that I believe attracted the police.

I used to get cut on in my sleep in that house in Ohio. In between 98’-07’ I can’t total the number of people with the same ID that have cut on me. It was bad news. (What do you think they were taking and how did this victimize me) Many of the people, that I haven’t mentioned their name, use the same name inside, even when they don’t say it. He uses that name outside. That’s how he would introduce himself. Stinks to be him. Huh? *Subconscious impressions made with every slice*

0 notes

paulbenedictblog · 4 years

Text

%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

Bbc news El concurso de enigmas de rock de Francia da sentido a la misteriosa inscripción

Bbc news

.spinner-container width:25%; top:20px; left:50%; margin-left:-12.5%; border-radius:8px; position:fixed; text-align:center; box-shadow:0 0 10px rgba(0,0,0,0.24); background:#fff; overflow:hidden; .spinner-container p font-family:'Roboto', Arial, sans-serif; color:rgba(0,0,0,0.87); margin:12px 0 16px 0; padding:0; font-size:12px; .spinner-container img width:22px; height:22px; margin:16px 0 0; padding:0;

Translating...

Image copyright AFP

Image caption The winning translations mentioned the inscription used to be about a tragic death

A contest to decipher a 230-year-outdated college message on a rock on the waft of Brittany has found that a tragic death used to be on the coronary heart of the inscription.

The village of Plougastel launched a contest to decipher the mysterious message after native specialists possess been unable to scheme sense of it.

Two winners prick up the €2,000 (£1,679) prize money on Monday.

Mayor Dominique Cap mentioned their translations had differed however the resulting stories possess been "very an analogous".

Every winners agreed that the inscription used to be made in remembrance of a man who died.

Noël René Toudic, an English trainer and Celtic language professional, mentioned he worked on the postulate that the author used to be a semi-literate man talking 18th-Century Breton.

The key phase of his translation reads: "Serge died when with no skill at rowing, his boat used to be tipped over by the wind."

The opposite winning entry used to be by historian Roger Faligot and artist Alain Robet.

They also allege the textual say is written in Breton, however deem about a of the phrases are Welsh.

Their translation reads: "He used to be the incarnation of braveness and joie de vivre. Someplace on the island he used to be struck and he is ineffective."

Chanced on about a years ago, the 20-line inscription is written on a metre-excessive slab in a cove in Brittany, easiest accessible at low tide.

Alongside common French letters, some are reversed or upside-down and there are also some Scandinavian-sort Ø letters.

The years 1786 and 1787 are considered, relationship the inscription to about a years earlier than the French Revolution. There would possibly perchance be also the image of a ship and a coronary heart surmounted by a corrupt.

The inscription used to be chanced on about a years ago however native lecturers possess been unable to elaborate it.

Local officials mentioned 61 full translations possess been submitted within the competition. Most came from France, however entries possess been also submitted from countries including the US and Thailand.

A panel made up of historians judged the entries, discovering that the 2 winning theories possess been potentially the most plausible interpretations.

Mr Cap mentioned there used to be mute distance to head to "completely solve the mystery" however described the final result of the competition as a "enormous step forward", in accordance with AFP info agency.

Bbc news Which you'll moreover be attracted to watching:

Media playback is unsupported in your instrument

Media captionBBC Newsnight used to be given uncommon glean entry to to the Chauvet cave and its outstanding artwork

function gtElInit() var lib=new google.translate.TranslateService(); lib.setCheckVisibility(false); lib.translatePage('en', 'es', function (progress, done, error) if (progress==100 );

0 notes

nancygduarteus · 5 years

Text

Grieving the Future I Imagined for My Daughter

Just after midnight, I felt the first unmistakable contraction. I still had two days until my due date, but I knew it was time to get to the hospital. A bulldozer inside my uterus revved its engine, shifted into high gear, and rammed a baby out into the world less than two hours later. Her name would be Isobel, Izzy for short.

She weighed five pounds, three ounces, below the threshold for “normal.” This was surprising—I’d had an uneventful pregnancy, and in one of my last prenatal checkups, my obstetrician predicted that she’d weigh about seven pounds.

Did the doctor miscalculate my due date? I wondered. Should I have taken more prenatal vitamins? Eaten better, worked less?

There would be no explanation, at least not then. We moved upstairs into a recovery room with a view of the summer sun rising behind the Oakland, California, hills. In those early-morning hours, I cradled Izzy’s warm, powdery body and nestled into a feeling that everything was fine.

Five weeks later my father, a retired pediatrician, put a stethoscope to Izzy’s chest and heard a hissing noise. An echocardiogram two days after that revealed a small hole in the membrane dividing the lower chambers of her heart, causing oxygenated blood to leak back into her lungs. The cardiologist explained that her heart was working harder than it needed to, burning extra calories and keeping her small.

Odds were that over the next few months, new tissue would grow and the hole would “spontaneously” close. Considering how much of human development happens on its own, for a heart to correct itself in this way seemed perfectly plausible. I told myself that’s what would happen. At Christmas and New Year’s Eve gatherings with family and friends, that’s what I told them, too.

But my hope was no match for the eventual and unanimous recommendation from a panel of two dozen cardiologists: open-heart surgery, and soon. A force I could not see was starting to take over.

As Izzy’s surgery date neared, I could feel the panic slowly and steadily growing inside me. I retreated into what could be known: A cardiopulmonary-bypass machine would bring her body to a sub-hypothermic temperature, allowing the heart to stop beating. The surgeon would saw through the sternum, shave a tiny piece of tissue off the heart’s outer membrane, and use it to patch the hole. A resident would sew her back up.

Two conversations helped convince me that after the surgery, Izzy would grow up healthy and things for our family would return to normal. The first was with a couple whose son had the same procedure with the same surgeon. They apologized for having to mute the phone for short stretches to temper their 5-year-old’s rambunctiousness, something I found reassuring.

The second was an email exchange with a woman who underwent a valve replacement in the 1970s, when open-heart surgery on babies was still relatively uncommon. “I was a three-season athlete in high school,” she wrote, “and did all the partying that everyone else did. The only impact on me was a scar that healed well and frankly, made me feel like a bit of a badass.”

Less than 24 hours after doctors had wheeled Izzy into the operating room for surgery, she was guzzling down bottles of high-calorie formula. In 72 hours, her rosiness returned; eight days later, we left the hospital and arrived home to find the first buds on our magnolia tree. Within a few weeks, Izzy had gained enough weight to make her growth-chart debut at the 0.2 percentile. Witnessing her scar heal was like watching a time-lapse movie, only in real time.

I started the process of reeling our ship back to shore—we’d be there soon, I thought. My parents booked their flight back to the East Coast, and my husband started a new job earlier than planned. Disillusioned by my last tech job, I was determined to make a fresh start somewhere else. I could envision the end of Izzy’s recovery period, the loving nanny I’d finally hire, a more deliberate career.

But, no. Just as we’d caught sight of land, we were again suddenly unmoored, pushed by unforgiving hands back out into the dark, open sea.

The cardiologist called on an unseasonably warm afternoon, a Tuesday last April.

Sure, I have a few minutes.

I glanced at Izzy, eight months old, wearing only a diaper. The edges of the five-inch incision line down the middle of her chest were still red and puckered from the suture removal a few days earlier. Her scar served as a visual cue that, surely, the worst was behind us.

The call itself was not a shock. One week before surgery, a neurologist had examined Izzy and noticed abnormalities in her facial features so subtle that I, her mother, could barely see them myself—slightly wide-set eyes, straight eyebrows, a thin upper lip, a tiny hole on the upper ridge of her ear that I’d mistaken for a mole. Genetic testing would be the sensible next step, the neurologist had said. He’d ordered seven vials of Izzy’s blood to be drawn in the OR.

The cardiologist began with a “Well …” followed by a sigh. Then his voice assumed the objectivity of a radio traffic reporter describing a seven-car wreck, and he rattled off the details he knew.

I absorbed only the keywords—“abnormal result … syndrome … genetic material missing …”—and scribbled “1p36” on the back of a stray Home Depot receipt. Anxious for more information, I ended the call and grabbed my laptop.

I steadied my fingers and clicked through to an online forum where parents had celebrated their child’s first step at 3, 4, or 8 years old. They compared devices to help nonverbal children communicate and shared work-arounds to Keppra, an anti-seizure medication that can cause kids to bite themselves or hallucinate.

As I skimmed their posts, my heart pounded and I started to hyperventilate. Air was stuck in my throat; I screamed to let it out, gripping the edge of the kitchen counter so I could scream louder. I felt as if I was suffocating in a room filled with invisible pillows, and the only thing that could cut through it was noise in the form of very loud, guttural, incomprehensible screaming. I slammed a door leading into the bedroom and pounded the walls. I remember thinking, I don’t give a shit if the neighbors hear.

The internet confirmed a truth that up until that moment lay beyond the boundaries of what I’d ever imagined possible for my child’s life or my own. As a mental warm-up before her birth, I’d imagined Izzy in painful situations that were both better (a broken arm, pneumonia, being bullied) and far worse (my death, or hers). I hadn’t imagined a scenario in which she might not walk or talk, or where she’d live with debilitating seizures. I hadn’t imagined that I might be uncertain whether she recognizes me. I hadn’t imagined caring for her for the rest of my life. I now had two children, but was only just beginning to understand what it means to be a parent.

The next day, my husband left early for his third day of work at his new job. In an orientation session about employee volunteering, while the presenter rolled a video about the Make-A-Wish Foundation, he sat in the back row and wept. Meanwhile, after a long, sleepless night, my son watched cartoons as I crawled through Izzy’s morning routine, taking breaks to ice my swollen eyelids. I finally got everyone dressed and dropped him off at preschool a few hours late without the words to explain why.

The day after that, Izzy and I had a geneticist appointment at the medical campus five blocks away. I’d been here before. Almost one year earlier, in my second trimester, I’d sat through the routine prenatal screening for birth defects and Down syndrome. The results had been normal.

The geneticist came in to greet me and Izzy. As I took in her easy, welcoming smile, a wave of relief washed over me. The test was wrong, and this is all a terrible mistake!

This was a delusion. She led us into an examination room, where we were joined by a younger, more clinical assistant. I called my husband and put him on speakerphone—we’d agreed before the appointment that he didn’t need to be there in person, a sign that at some level we had not yet fully grasped the magnitude of Izzy’s diagnosis.

The geneticist told us that my daughter has “the most common of rare syndromes diagnosed after birth.” Her tone remained gentle, but unequivocal.

“The size of her genetic deletion is clinically significant.”

Go on.

“It’s hard to say what that means in terms of how the syndrome will present.”

I recounted some of what the internet had told me. Will she walk? Talk? Hear? Seize? See?

“We just have to wait and see.”

We reviewed three single-spaced pages of test results that looked as though they had come out of a dot-matrix printer. The geneticist was quick to clarify that “terminal deletion” referred to the physical location of Izzy’s 133 missing genes (that is, the terminus of the “p” arm of chromosome 1) and did not suggest that the syndrome itself leads to death, although its complications sometimes can. A second, more user-friendly handout summarized the syndrome’s most common “features” in a tidy, bullet-pointed list: seizures, deafness, blindness, low muscle tone, feeding issues, digestive disorders, heart disease, heart defects, kidney disease, intellectual disability, and behavior problems.

I fixated on the likelihood that Izzy would be nonverbal, feeling gutted by the possibility that she might not talk or even develop the coordination to sign. How would she express herself? How would I know her?

My husband left the appointment by hanging up. The geneticist briefly examined Izzy’s “curly” toes, noting it as a common and typically benign congenital anomaly—connected to her syndrome, perhaps, but no one could know for sure.

I packed up our things and made our way home. The only certainty I left with was that I had a lot more to worry about than a couple of curly toes.

Books, the internet, and friends said I would go through a grieving period. But I am still not entirely sure what I am grieving.

I didn’t lose a child; now a year post-op, Izzy is here and very much alive. She shakes her head vigorously when she’s happy, and grunts indignantly when she’s not. She has gobs of voluminous hair that looks as if it’s been blown out at a salon—a common trait for “1pers,” who bear a strong physical resemblance to one another; many don’t look like their parents. But unlike most “typical” 21-month-old toddlers, she cannot yet sit up by herself (let alone toddle), grab a spoon, or use any words to communicate. A few weeks ago, she started to regularly say “aaaah,” one of the vowel sounds that are the first forms of speech—a milestone that most babies hit at four to five months old.

I spent the months following Izzy’s diagnosis deeply confused about how I should feel. Her heart defect had been an isolated biological issue, and the surgery was a relatively common procedure. The hole is gone. A genetic syndrome is different—uncontained and unfixable. Every cell in Izzy’s body lacks some data, and there’s no way those data can be recovered.

During sleepless nights, I anchored my grief in the heft of Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon’s profound, 1,000-page book about the challenges parents face in accepting differences in their children. “We depend on the guarantee in our children’s faces that we will not die,” Solomon writes. “Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do.” The book offered me a crucial mooring. Powerless to change my circumstances, I could at least change my psychology.

I am learning that grief can be complicated and ambiguous—that we hold ideas and expectations of ourselves and loved ones so tightly that we have difficulty seeing them from any distance, and that it’s even harder to let them go.

I can describe what’s gone. I’ve lost the buoyancy I gained from the conversation with the parents of the rambunctious 5-year-old boy. I no longer feel the relief, even joy, of envisioning Izzy as an athletic, partying, badass teenager.

I lost any lightheartedness I had left as the 40-year-old mother of two young children. I lost my faith in statistics. A 99.98 percent chance of something not happening is also a .02 percent chance that it will.

I lost the ability to enjoy the scene of my two kids together without feeling guilty that I’d sold my son short. Instead, it’s a reminder of the responsibility I feel to gently acculturate him to the strange, politicized world of disability rights and rare diseases, and to breed empathy and a respect of difference in him above all else.

I lost the identity, earnings, and lifestyle that came with having an upward career trajectory and being an equal breadwinner to my husband. We now have the sort of traditional arrangement I never thought I’d be in: He makes all the money, and I do most of the emotional, logistical, and physical labor of child-rearing. For Izzy, this includes frequent doctor appointments, three therapy sessions a week, and a lot of open-ended research and worrying.

This laundry list of dreams lost has positive value, Solomon maintains. “While optimism can propel day-to-day life forward, realism allows parents to regain a feeling of control over what is happening and to come to see their trauma as smaller than it first seemed.”

Without crumbly, unreliable hope, what else is there? There’s my child, no less alive or human than any other, and with abilities and inabilities much different than I imagined. And realism, which I’ll use to reassemble a positive, long-term picture of what her life could be. Izzy’s diagnosis wiped my canvas clean. But while the expanse of whiteness is unsettling, it is also temporary. Soon there will be lines, contours, shading—a new and beautiful composition. I will not accept less.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/04/1p36-genetic-disorder-reshaping-my-family/586717/?utm_source=feed

0 notes

ionecoffman · 5 years

Text

Grieving the Future I Imagined for My Daughter

Did the doctor miscalculate my due date? I wondered. Should I have taken more prenatal vitamins? Eaten better, worked less?

But my hope was no match for the eventual and unanimous recommendation from a panel of two dozen cardiologists: open-heart surgery, and soon. A force I could not see was starting to take over.

But, no. Just as we’d caught sight of land, we were again suddenly unmoored, pushed by unforgiving hands back out into the dark, open sea.

The cardiologist called on an unseasonably warm afternoon, a Tuesday last April.

Sure, I have a few minutes.

The geneticist came in to greet me and Izzy. As I took in her easy, welcoming smile, a wave of relief washed over me. The test was wrong, and this is all a terrible mistake!

The geneticist told us that my daughter has “the most common of rare syndromes diagnosed after birth.” Her tone remained gentle, but unequivocal.

“The size of her genetic deletion is clinically significant.”

Go on.

“It’s hard to say what that means in terms of how the syndrome will present.”

I recounted some of what the internet had told me. Will she walk? Talk? Hear? Seize? See?

“We just have to wait and see.”

I packed up our things and made our way home. The only certainty I left with was that I had a lot more to worry about than a couple of curly toes.

Books, the internet, and friends said I would go through a grieving period. But I am still not entirely sure what I am grieving.

Article source here:The Atlantic

0 notes

clusterassets · 6 years

Text

New world news from Time: ‘We’re Ready, if Our Nation Calls.’ A Top U.S. Navy Commander in the Pacific on China, North Korea and More

Vice Admiral Phillip G. Sawyer has come a long way from his hometown of Phoenix, Ariz., to command America’s largest forward-deployed maritime force, the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet based in Japan.

It’s a tough job at a tense time in the Asia Pacific. The Trump administration is zeroing in on strategic competition from what it calls “revisionist powers” China and Russia, while North Korea poses an escalating threat to the U.S. and its regional allies.

Even as demands increased, the Navy faced its own tragedies last year, when two warship collisions resulted in the deaths of 17 sailors and an estimated $500 million in damages. Investigators determined that the accidents involving the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John McCain, both Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, were preventable. Sawyer assumed command after his predecessor was dismissed in the wake of the collisions.

In late January, TIME traveled to the 7th Fleet’s headquarters in Yokosuka, near the outskirts of Tokyo, to speak with Sawyer about the Navy’s combat credibility and the challenges waiting on the Pacific horizon.

What is the immediate challenge you face now that you’ve taken on the job?

Since the 1990s, our number of operational units has gone steadily down while our operational demand signal has increased. So our job at large is to be able to prioritize what we can do based on the supply of people and ships that I have. There is an insatiable demand for the United States military, and in my case the U.S. Navy. People, organizations will always want more than we can provide, that’s just a fact of life.

When we talk about strategic waterways around here, this is what we’ve been doing for decades. I would argue that economic development out here in the Pacific has been largely underwritten by the U.S. Navy. We have been able to provide regional stability and security since the end of World War II, and that security and stability has enabled the countries out here to focus internally on their own economic and populace development. We have many alliances and many partners out here and that’s a good spot to be in.

Read more: President Trump’s New Defense Strategy Is a Return to the Cold War

Are those alliances as strong as they used to be?

I look at this from a purely Naval standpoint. When we talk about alliances, we’re talking about Navy-to-Navy engagement with our allies — South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and Australia. We have a very, very robust working relationship and exercise relationship with those countries. So from my viewpoint as a Naval officer, I think those alliances continue and they get better and better. There’s always gonna be some twists and turns in any relationship. But from my viewpoint I consider them strong allies. It’s where our objectives overlap that strengthen us and allow us to work together.

Can you keep the the South China Sea free and open?

In the foreseeable future I don’t see the sea-lanes closing down. It’s not just about our interests — you’ve got Vietnam, Thailand, all the ASEAN countries, we all have the same stake in this — the amount of merchandise, global trade, commerce that goes through there is huge. So I don’t see anybody trying to close down the South China Sea. Many of our actions there are in furtherance of international norms, standards and laws. That’s why we continue to sail, fly and operate everywhere international law allows. So I don’t even see that as a possibility that the South China Sea would be closed to free trade.

The National Defense Strategy that came out recently talks about China being a strategic competitor. I think it’s important to recognize that the military is just one part of government. You’ve got diplomatic, economic and other aspects of our government that come into play throughout the world. I think those aspects are equally if not more important on a day-to-day basis than the military. I provide space and options for our leadership well before they want to call me in. I recognize there have been territorial issues in the South China Sea that many would argue are not in compliance with international law. That’s a valid description. But I don’t see anyone trying to close down the international waterways as we see them.

Read more: Inside the International Contest Over the Most Important Waterway In the World

How concerned are you about Chinese militarization in the South China Sea?

Well, I think even [Chinese President] Xi Jinping said they were not going to militarize these islands on the South China Sea. He said it on the South Lawn of the White House, if I’m not mistaken.

We do see progress being made, buildings being constructed and other things. They’ve come out and said what they will not do, so at the government level we need to check their homework and make sure they abide by their commitments.

What can you do if they don’t abide by those commitments?

We want to resolve these issues diplomatically. I’d push that to the State Department and see what they could do. From a military standpoint, I’m a hammer if you’ve got a nail. I’m one tool, but there are many that can be used before you want to use the hammer. We’re not even close to a conflict out here, in particular with China. They don’t want to go to war with me, and the United States doesn’t want to go to war with China. That said, my job is to be ready with whatever our government needs.

What are the lessons to be learned from the two tragic collisions last year?

I think it’s important to recognize that the accidents, while they were tragic, were also preventable. We should not forget as we move forward that we lost 17 sailors’ lives, and that’s one of the motivators for getting things right. As a military leader, the treasures we have are the sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, the nieces and nephews of the American populace. There’s a covenant; families provide their treasure to us as a military, and our job is to defend the homeland and to make sure we take care of the people that are entrusted to us. That’s critically important.

We didn’t get here overnight, therefore the important part is accurately identifying causes and the right corrective actions. What I’m doing with my team out here in the very near term on those things that I can uniquely control, is scheduling; making things deliberate and predictable, to make sure we carve out time for maintenance, training and certification.

Specialist 3rd Class Jake Greenberg—U.S. Navy/Getty Images The USS John C. Stennis and USS Ronald Reagan conduct operations in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations on June 18, 2016.

In the event of war with North Korea, what’s the scale of conflict that you need to be prepared for?

My goal is to be ready for anything from a natural disaster like a typhoon, all the way to the highest end of kinetic warfare that you can envision. That’s what I’m paid for. If I don’t focus on the highest levels of warfare, you’re not getting your money’s worth out of me. By focusing on the highest levels, I can accomplish anything less than that. We’re ready, if our nation calls.

What would be the role of the 7th Fleet in nuclear warfare?

I don’t really have a role in nuclear conflict, which is up to Strategic Command in Nebraska and our leadership back in D.C. I don’t envision a nuclear conflict at any time in the foreseeable future. I just don’t think that’s a plausible scenario.

When the false alarm was sent out in Hawaii, where were you and what went through your mind?

I was actually traveling that day to Hawaii. I found out just after the fact, I certainly understand the angst it caused.

If the alarm were real, what would have happened?

Well, without getting into classified information, there are procedures. Clearly, if the U.S. was attacked, it changes whatever I had planned to do that day.

February 09, 2018 at 06:30AM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

#Time #world #news #ClusterAssets #ClusterAsset #Cluster Asset Inc.#ClusterAssets Inc.

0 notes