Lots of News for August 2007

It is hard to believe how much has happened in the last month!!!!! It has been absolutely amazing. Where do I start? The beginning of August started with stress as a local doctor thought she found some irregularities in Amanda's metabolism but thankfully, the doctors at UCLA and in Raleigh did not agree. So things look good there now. We are doing some follow up to confirm the good news.

The next week of August brought our trip to West Virginia. This was a life altering experience! We went up to meet with the people from Hearts-N-pawsTM (http://www.Hearts-N-paws.org/) and paws4peopleTM (http://www.paws4people.org/) who are our angels on earth. They are going to provide Amanda with a service dog!!! It will be such a blessing to Amanda to have a best friend and helper around all the time. When the dog graduates, it will know over 100 commands. It will be able to turn on and off lights, pick up things for her, help steady her in her walker, and most importantly be her best friend when she starts school. The dogs are being trained by female prisoners in a Federal penitentiary.

.

While the dogs are not officially assigned to people yet, we are hoping that the very special bond forged between Amanda and a dog named ELLIE is foreshadowing of things to come. There was a supernatural bond between Amanda and ELLIE and it happened instantaneously. ELLIE couldn't seem to get enough of Amanda and vice versa. ELLIE seemed to bond to every member of our family faster than I can ever recall seeing an animal bond. She was not afraid of Amanda wearing a mask or Amanda's walker. She just wanted to lay her head in Amanda's lap or lay at her feet. Amanda liked the feeling of petting her and loved all the doggie kisses. Katie loved ELLIE too. I think Katie would rate the WV trip as one of the highlights of her life! She loved being around all the dogs, meeting a special friend named Ashley, and learning all sorts of dog training and care techniques. She was shy at first around the prisoners but quickly warmed up and chatted up a storm with them.

.

Speaking of the prisoners. It was a wonderful experience to meet the prisoners who are training the dogs and to meet the dogs. The prisoners were incredibly nice people. They were mothers, grandmothers, professionals, college students, etc who had made a mistake at some point in their lives but were still incredible, warm, caring, and wonderful people. They are very committed to training a dog that will help Amanda. It was amazing to meet them and to realize that aside from a bad decision somewhere along the way, these ladies could be our neighbors, walking buddies, and best friends. They will always hold a special place in my heart for what they are doing for Amanda. You can learn more about the paws4prisonsTM experience at http://www.paws4prisons.org/. Also, if you sign up for the free newsletter there, it will help paws4prisonsTM in their fundraising efforts. Amanda's story was featured in the last newsletter and I will be contributing an article related to our prison visit in the next newsletter.

.

Speaking of fundraising, if you would like to make a donation to help Amanda get her service dog, please go to http://www.amanda.paws4people.org/. The dog is provided to our family free of charge but in exchange we agreed to help run an awareness and fundraising campaign to help raise the money to cover all of the expenses in training and caring for the dogs. We sincerely appreciate any help you can provide. You can make a direct donation at the website or you can buy raffle tickets to have a chance of winning a million dollars where a portion of the money raised goes towards covering the expenses of Amanda's dog. Also, if anyone works for a company who may want to sponsor Amanda by putting the http://www.amanda.charityraffles.org/ link on their website, please let me know (sdivance@yahoo.com). This is a great opportunity for companies to get credit for raising money for charity without having to make a corporate contribution themselves (it is hoped that visitors to the site, employees, etc would enter the raffle). Lastly, there is a very nice write-up on Amanda at the paws4peopleTM website at http://www.amanda.story.paws4people.org/.

.

The other big news for August is that the Wilmington Star News ran a story on Amanda and made a video of her. There were a few errors in the story and video (her prognosis is much better than reported) but overall they were both great. If you would like to see the video, contact me and I can send you a DVD (it is no longer available as a link on the internet). You will get a kick out of seeing Amanda ride her therapy horse and help drive her mini pony.

.

Lastly, we got accepted into the University of Alabama Birmingham constraint therapy program for Nov 26- Dec 21 of this year. In this program, they will cast Amanda's good arm and force her to use her weaker arm via 6 hour occupational therapy sessions 5-6 days per week. We are excited about the opportunity for Amanda. A friend of hers had great improvement as a result of the program. It costs $15,000 and is not covered by insurance so we are pinching our pennies. It will be well worth it though because it can make a huge lifelong difference in the usage of her weaker side.

.

Also, she is completely weaned off of one of her medicines so she is down to only 2 anti-seizure medicines per day!!! Hooray!!!! Thanks again for all of your love and support. We appreciate all the prayers, friendship, love and support you all show to our family. God Bless!
Susan