{"id":1640,"date":"2017-04-09T15:53:03","date_gmt":"2017-04-09T14:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.wordpress.com\/?p=1640"},"modified":"2024-06-01T10:49:36","modified_gmt":"2024-06-01T10:49:36","slug":"im-back-explanation-for-absence-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/2017\/04\/09\/im-back-explanation-for-absence-here\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m Back&#8230;So Sorry For The Loooooong Absence!"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"text\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"text\" style=\"text-align: justify;\">Yes I am still around&#8230;so sorry for the huge gap since my last post!<\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I hadn&#8217;t intended to vanish off the face of the Earth, but life happened. Job changes, a long-running illness and sadly the loss of a close family member in January kept me busy in ways I hadn&#8217;t anticipated. Grief is a strange and unwelcome presence, I&#8217;m discovering. It&#8217;s still early days so things still feel very bumpy but I&#8217;ve missed writing the blog and have only just responded to the many, many questions you&#8217;ve been asking so it&#8217;s definitely time to get back on it!<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1673\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1673\" style=\"width: 274px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-1673\" src=\"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/cocktail-bar-photo-2-1-1.jpg?w=450\" alt=\"Yes that is my cocktail bar. I rarely drink and I have a cocktail bar. I just love playing hostess!\" width=\"274\" height=\"365\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1673\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Still alive&#8230;and still kicking!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So in terms of health, my shunt is still behaving itself which is fantastic. The fact that in every other way my life has felt a bit all over the place but my shunt hasn&#8217;t really done anything other than keep me going is testament to what an amazing little piece of equipment it actually is. I came down with &#8216;flu (proper, knocks-you-sideways &#8216;flu) after forgetting to get my &#8216;flu vaccination last year. Rapped knuckles for that one&#8230;having &#8216;flu at any time is horrible but with hydrocephalus it is officially ten times worse (I can safely say that having had &#8216;flu both before and after hydrocephalus!). It ended up turning into a bad chest infection which ended up with x-rays at the hospital but now it&#8217;s gone and I&#8217;m feeling back to my &#8216;normal&#8217; self. &#8216;Normal&#8217; will always be written in inverted commas when applying the term to myself; I don&#8217;t think what I feel day to day with hydrocephalus is &#8216;normal&#8217; in relation to the rest of the population but I&#8217;m used to it&#8230;so it is normal for me.<br \/>\nOne of the very positive things that has happened is that I&#8217;ve started rehearsing with my band again. \u00a0I have sung in many bands over the years (being a singing teacher and all that) but my favourite band, the country and Americana-based one called Family Nash, split when we just became too busy with our schedules.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1679\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1679\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1679\" src=\"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/terry-jo-rehersal-1-1.jpg?w=600\" alt=\"Terry Jo rehersal\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1679\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Terry (guitarist) and Jo (or Banjo Jo as we call her!) at our first rehearsal for years. \u00a0We eat apples during our breaks. \u00a0We&#8217;re not very rock and roll.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u00a0I was in and out of hospital an awful lot at the time so couldn&#8217;t really be relied upon too much when it came to gigging&#8230;which is a not very helpful when you&#8217;re the lead singer. \u00a0Anyway, Terry, Jo and I decided it had been long enough and gathered at mine the other week to see how many songs we could remember. Quite a lot of them as it turned out! \u00a0We chugged out some tunes by the Dixie Chicks, Dolly Parton etc. and had a good catch-up in the process. We aren&#8217;t planning to gig soon but just playing and singing the old tunes (and some new ones) is enough for us at the moment. \u00a0If I can work out a way to post up a video or tune on here, you can have a listen for yourself!<br \/>\nIn terms of the work with the shunts&#8230;well that&#8217;s been keeping me busy too so I&#8217;ll cover everything regarding that in the next post!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Keep sending in your questions and I&#8217;ll keep doing my best to answer them. \u00a0I&#8217;m thinking of starting a forum on here (or elsewhere if it&#8217;s not possible to add one to this site) so you can all talk to each other as well as me. \u00a0What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes I am still around&#8230;so sorry for the huge gap since my last post! I hadn&#8217;t intended to vanish off the face of the Earth, but life happened. Job changes, a long-running illness and sadly the loss of a close family member in January kept me busy in ways I hadn&#8217;t anticipated. Grief is a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[19,22,56,63,72,75],"class_list":["post-1640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-living-with-hydrocephalus-the-truth-not-the-textbook","tag-brain","tag-brain-surgery","tag-health","tag-hydrocephalus","tag-life","tag-medical"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/cocktail-bar-photo-3-cropped-e1491749808766-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2289,"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions\/2289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jordantheheadcase.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}