Sarah Rise Weekly Updates

The weather this autumn has been unseasonably warm, which made it possible to carve pumpkins outside. Usually for Halloween itself people worry about how many layers they need to put under or over their costume, but this year the concern was about being too warm! It was 80 degrees. I was so sure that we… Read more »

Last Sunday was a gorgeous autumn day – the perfect day for Sarah to ride her bike on a forest trail for the first time ever. Carl, Amy, and Sarah rode their bikes while I walked. Maybe next time I will ride too because Sarah is independent enough, and if she does need help then… Read more »

Last Sunday Sarah attended her school’s Homecoming Dance with a group of school friends. I love that she has this group of friends, and I can also see she is still sometimes a bit separate and disconnected from them. They welcome her and look out for her, but she isn’t quite a part of conversations… Read more »

Amy is now the owner of a Whisper brace, and it is a harder adjustment than we anticipated. Somehow we thought it would only be better than her old one, not thinking about how it would be pushing in new places because she has grown and changed since she got her old brace. Just like… Read more »

Last Sunday, Amy and I drove to Philadelphia in time to have dinner with Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop and to celebrate Mom-Mom’s birthday. Then we drove to our hotel so that the next morning we would have a short drive to the orthotist who would measure Amy for her Whisper Brace. We learned about this new… Read more »

A few weeks ago I started taking Topiramate to hopefully function as a cluster buster for my headaches. Around that time I also started feeling slightly weird in a variety of small ways, but each way could have some alternate explanation, especially once I got covid, at which point I assumed that my feeling weird… Read more »

Remarkably, in the past, whenever one member of our family got covid, somehow the others did not get it. This time around, Sarah, Carl, and I all got it. Knock on wood, somehow Amy managed to avoid it – perhaps because she spends so little time around us during the school week. Last weekend I… Read more »

The veritable wringer. That is what I felt like I went through this week. And yet, with a bit more time to think about things, I also considered that maybe it was a week filled with blessings. Either way, it was still certainly an intensely full week. Despite my parenthetical care to whisper about my… Read more »

Last Sunday as part of the finale to the Big Family Celebration, we all participated in a skateboarding lesson. I was so impressed with Sarah for suiting up in her helmet and pads, not doubting of herself or her abilities, with a desire to learn something new. Amy also tried the lesson, though she later… Read more »

My cluster headache story arc is always, always, always the same, and yet every time I think things will be different. This thought and hope are true, because I do always try new things and they always do work some of the time. Yet, despite the nuances, the basic shape of my experience repeats every… Read more »