Monday, July 12th

First of all, I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love, concern and prayers for Lynn and his situation.  It has truly held him up during this incredibly difficult, and life changing time.  Let me try to explain what happened.  In the early morning hours of Saturday Lynn experienced a ruptured thoracic disc in the T-10 area of his spine.  This is an extremely rare occurence (the neurosurgeon last performed this kind of emergency surgery 5 years ago!)
The rupture caused his body to seize up and evetually the discs pressing on his spinal cord caused first paralysis in his right side from above his belly button on down and then on his left side.   He was operated on to remove the disc pieces and the operation was completely successful from a technical stand point (no further damage to the spinal cord).  Right after surgery,however, he still showed paralysis from the waist down.

Why did this happen?  Lynn did nothing to cause this.  It was a combination of his skeletal makeup and the aging process.  It was not caused by any event.  The doctors keep repeating that so Lynn stops feeling responsible.  

Where are we as of today?  Well, each day there is some feeling returning to some parts of his lower body.  Is it enough to have hope he will be able to walk again? Not sure yet.  So keep the prayers of healing flowing!  He did survive two PT (physical therapy) sessions today.  PT right now consists of him tring to sit unassisted at the side of his bed for 15 minutes.  Tomorrow they will try to get him into a chair to do this.  His right leg has little feeling but his left leg is better.  No real toe movement yet and that is key I gather.

I hope this isn't more info. than you want to know.  It is amazing how grateful you become for even the smallest improvements, i.e. rolling into a new postion, for instance, with less pain and more fluid motion.  Things get stripped down to the very basics.

Again, thank you so much, all of you!