Hi there,
It has been a long time since I have updated the blog. I’m so sorry that it seems that my blog is somewhat like a roller-coaster kind of story. One time, it was all sunny, the next was gloom and damnations. Perhaps it was a reflection of the reality. May be it was simply me and my moods.
Well, friends. There is nothing earth-shattering to tell you. There is no bad news neither. Gabriel in general is doing better. He repeats a few more words and uses a couple of more meaningful words. He is also more mobile and crawls to places more frequent then before. He holds his head high up and straight half of the time now. And often he would tilt his head, and ‘scan’ or ‘search’ with his eyes, as though looking for something. But he is as blind as ever. Once when he was sitting on my lap when we drove through a shady road, I noticed that he shut his eyes when the car swerved to the sunny side and then re-opened his eyes when in the shades. He did this throughout the short journey. He gave us the impression that he is having some light perception. But then, when we shown the torch light into his eyes, he didn’t even acknowledge it. It’s all a contradiction of incidents. So we are never sure. All in all, we can only say that he is progressing, at a snail’s pace.
I sometimes wonder if the stem cells are still growing and alive in his body. I wonder if they are still working to improve his ‘condition’. I also wonder if his progress had simply been due to his natural course of growing up. However, I often think that his current steady small progress is a mix of both, natural and the additional cells which somehow had served as a little booster.
I have somewhat accepted that I can’t keep looking at the timeline to conclude that the stem cells had ‘worked’. I have come to think that the stem cells had worked in its own way. To say that it didn’t work would not be true as I had seen the positive change in Gabriel in China. However small, the change was there. And the progress kept going. There were no thundering miracles like what had happened to some other patients. What we had got had been subtle little progress. Different body works differently. This is as good as what Gabriel is going to get from his treatment in China, I believe. And I think it had not been nothing. It had helped him and is still helping him in certain ways. Not in the way where I had initially had gone for, but it had still been good for him.
I pray that the stem cells are still living, alive and growing in his body, that it will continue to help him to progress and be stronger. He seems to be going there. Slowly at his own pace. For those of you who might be going through my similar uncertainties, be patient and look at the positive change in your child. That might have been the ‘miracle’ of the stem cells. You might have been wishing for something else and was disappointed. But, you might see something else there that you had not been aware of its importance before. You might then realised how far your child had gone forward.
Best regards,
Asty
astychow@yahoo.com