Mariannel’s Viral Cerebellitis Blog

15 March, 2009 – a year on

March 15th, 2009

Today it’s a year ago I left China. Time really does fly.

My take on the whole thing is that it definitely made a positive difference physically so that I can now do some things that I couldn’t do at all before while other things I just got better at. Psychologically as well as I’m now sure that something can be done to at least better my situation despite various expert assertions in the West that my condition is static. I didn’t see as much progress as I HOPED for but, I think, as much as I could realistically expect given the extent of damage to my cerebellum. I don’t feel the progress has been lost but that it has slowed down so I more or less got all I could out of the stem cells I already had. I also feel I would benefit from having more stem cells and build more on top of the progress I already had. So I would basically like to go back and will do so when I get the money together. Which could be a while but that’s the intention anyway.

Finally, while progress seems to have slowed down, I did experience one new thing recently that was immensely satisfying to me: As part of my daily physio I’ve been practising the movement of standing up since I was in China. At first I held on to the end of my bed as it’s too heavy to move, then I held on to the back of a chair with both hands, then with one hand (i.e. slowly increasing the need for my own stability/lessening the amount of support used). Recently I’ve been able to stand up very occasionally without holding on at all. Now it’s very rare that I can do this but it’s still very significant for me as for 6+ years I’ve not been able to do this at all.

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