The home page works, but trying to go to individual posts doesn’t NOW THEY DO!
Comments work if you use the pop-up version of them.
Obviously, I’m trying to solve this.
Did I miss anything? (/sarc)
PS. A large public thanks to the Tech Support people at Media Temple, and to NixGuy for getting me 90% of the way to solving the final problem.
Gee, that was fun.
What I thought would take a few hours “only” took 16; I’m sure it would have helped if I had some idea of what I was doing.
The home page works, but individual posts apparently don’t. Ruh-roh.
Hopefully temporary bad news that will fix itself when propagation is complete (crossing fingers). Comments won’t work until them, because you can’t get to ‘em.
Good news: Traffic spikes *shouldn’t* take the blog down any more.
More good news: There’s was a lot of debris from previous counters and other things that got left behind. (Knock on wood) the site has picked up a lot of speed. I hope that holds.
Starting tomorrow, we’ll see …. I mean zzzzzzzzzzzzz…..
Posted on Sun. Aug. 24, 2008
A young man left paralyzed by a mysterious sudden illness was able to regain his ability to walk despite doctors’ doubts.
His smile is makeup for his story. Covering his past, the laughter sticks to his face like flies to a broken windshield.
It’s this type of optimism that has helped Dennis Fortner III go from near death and walk into his future.
So he smiles.
Don’t let him fool you, though. It’s been a struggle. To this day, it’s still something his family tries to cope with. But for Fortner, he talks about his injury as if it were some road trip he took with friends.
”The cool part was I couldn’t feel my legs,” Fortner, 23, said smiling.
Although it’s far from perfect, the fact that he walks at all is a small miracle. Just four years ago, a doctor told him he would die. He didn’t listen.
Fortner was paralyzed from the waist down Aug. 29, 2004. By Christmas, he was walking.
On that August day, Fortner was just catching a wave, or at least trying. The former St. Augustine High School football player was at the local beach attempting to surf.
”They [waves] were pretty small,” he said. ”Nothing out of the ordinary”
Fortner, a backup defensive lineman, was joined by then-St. Augustine defensive coach Mike Milillo, a family friend, who was sitting back and watching. On this day he would have a front row seat to an enormous change in Fortner’s life.
Fortner took a relatively average spill. He thought he had a stinger, a minor neurological injury suffered by athletes that usually fades, and went to take a seat on the beach.
`I’M DYING’
‘I’m almost in tears from the pain, and he’s [Milillo] yelling, ‘Let’s ride up and down the beach looking for chippies [girls],’ ” Fortner said.
‘I told him, ‘I need to go home, take some Tylenol or something because I’m dying.’ It didn’t kick in right away.”
The two headed back to Milillo’s house. Fortner went immediately to the hot tub, trying to soak his muscles. He began to relax. Then it all went away.
”The funny thing is, I get in there and it’s scorching hot,” Fortner said. ”Then suddenly I’m wondering if it got freezing or something, because I can’t feel anything. I tried to get out and I couldn’t move. I can’t even describe it, it was the craziest feeling.”
He yelled to Milillo, telling him to come drag him out of the water. His coach just did as he was told. Milillo called his mother, then took him to the hospital.
”I guess it was confusing,” Milillo said. ”I just didn’t think he was that hurt. Then suddenly the kid can’t feel anything.”
By the time his mother arrived, Fortner was paralyzed.
At Flagler hospital, the panic came first.
The doctor said it was Guillain-Barre, a type of paralysis of the respiratory system and sure to kill him.
”In the most serious tone,” Fortner said. ‘The doctors looked at me and said, ‘You’re going to die.’ I can’t explain how that feels.”
Next, the confusion.
”It’s weird to go from surfing one minute to sitting in a hospital bed and you can’t move or feel your legs,” Fortner said. ”I wasn’t sure what to think, let alone say.”
Then, the denial.
”That’s not acceptable,” said Dennis Fortner II, his father. ”I’ve got 29 years in the military. I know how to solve problems. You don’t just accept defeat.
”It was like somebody reached into my chest and ripped my heart out. You want to yell at someone, but there’s no one to blame.”
The family headed to Shands in Gainesville for a second opinion, hoping to find answers.
It just happened they arrived during a medical conference, where some of the world’s best neurologists had gathered. Quickly they dismissed the first diagnoses. Good news. Then after a multitude of tests, they all concluded the same thing: They had no clue.
”So many doctors and nobody can figure it out,” Fortner said. ”They said I would never walk again, but they didn’t know why. I was a medical mystery.”
Then a medical miracle.
A DREAM OF RUNNING
Three weeks later, while Fortner was sleeping, he had an unusually vivid dream. In his mind he was running again, free of his hospital bed. It was so real it broke his consciousness, and he woke up gasping like he had a terrible nightmare. Moments later, he realized he had moved.
”I yelled at my parents, who were sleeping in the room,” Fortner said. ‘I told them, ‘I moved my leg, I moved my leg.’ ”
Fortner suddenly could move again from the waist down. There was no explanation. None was necessary.
”I thought I was having a bad dream, and just like that, it’s over,” Fortner’s father said.
The slight gain of feeling was only the beginning. But he was happy to start somewhere in a race that had before seemed endless.
Fortner was elated, but if you didn’t know any better, you would think he saw it coming.
”No way did I ever think I was gonna be in this wheelchair my whole life,” Fortner said. ”I had different plans.”
The next morning, the celebration was over. Everyone knew this wasn’t magic, just a small taste of luck on the road to recovery.
Rehab began slowly, and Fortner struggled. Yet he remained upbeat, sticking to his strictly optimistic attitude. To him, that was the key.
It rubbed off on his parents, his friends and all those around him.
”I couldn’t understand his attitude,” said Micah Clukey, a former St. Augustine kicker and Fortner’s best friend. ”Personally, I just admire him. He made me live for today.”
Fortner kept trying. He had to complete a list of activities before doctors would let him try to stand including lifting himself in and out of his wheelchair 50 times.
”I couldn’t do that before,” Fortner joked.
The rehab was brutal, and, according to the doctors, unnecessary. They told him his condition was likely to remain.
One day, the doctors strapped him to a machine that stood him upright. The nurse hoped if they let him feel what it was like to stand, he might give up his struggle and accept his condition.
”I had to convince the nurse to let me stay for another 30 minutes,” Fortner said. ”It was just the best feeling in the world.”
It only made things worse. After the experience, Fortner told the doctors to step up the process. For the nurse, it backfired.
‘I told them `hurry up,’ ” he said. ”Clearly, I don’t have all day.”
Soon after, they gave Fortner leg braces, ”like Forrest Gump,” and then a cane a few weeks later. He was making progress, all the time under the doctor’s belief he was heading toward a dead end. It got to the point where he just began to ignore them. This was his battle.
”I was going to walk,” he said. “I didn’t care what they had to say.” …..
Go here for the rest of the story.
Other stuff has intervened today. Then some cold-fighting put me under for a bit. But I’m back now.
Besides, as a Cincinnati-area person, keeping something less-than-desirable about Cleveland at the top for 18 hours hasn’t particularly bothered me. :–>
Had to be somewhere this morning, and the database overloaded the server. I’m back now.
…. are winning at the moment. The next Romney post will go up in the wee hours after some recovery time.
Got busy with business-related matters requiring attention this morning, and dragged into the afternoon under the weather with a constitutional matter unrelated to our founding documents.
The Romney-related post I had hoped to get to will have to wait until tomorrow.
Note: This post will stay at the top today. The picture was obtained from this Mark Finkelstein tribute at NewsBusters.
_________________________________
Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of our dear friend, Tony Snow. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Jill, and their children, Kendall, Robbie, and Kristi. The Snow family has lost a beloved husband and father. And America has lost a devoted public servant and a man of character.
Tony was one of our Nation’s finest writers and commentators. He earned a loyal following with incisive radio and television broadcasts. He was a gifted speechwriter who served in my father’s Administration. And I was thrilled when he agreed to return to the White House to serve as my Press Secretary. It was a joy to watch Tony at the podium each day. He brought wit, grace, and a great love of country to his work. His colleagues will cherish memories of his energetic personality and relentless good humor.
All of us here at the White House will miss Tony, as will the millions of Americans he inspired with his brave struggle against cancer. One of the things that sustained Tony Snow was his faith – and Laura and I join people across our country in praying that this good man has now found comfort in the arms of his Creator.
I was honored to see Snow speak in person in April and to have a few words with him. We jousted a bit over the early-1970s St. X-Princeton football rivalry, when we were at those respective high schools. As radiant and positive as he came across on TV and over the air, he was even moreso in person. Godspeed, Tony and family.
All I can say (that is fit to publish) in response to this AP story (saved here for future reference) is “Douglass Daniel and Jennifer Loven, you are so classless. How dare you?” More on that is here, if you can stand it.
…. are coming, but will have to wait for another day. Other necessary things have intervened.
….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:
I probably won’t be on the blog much for the next 20 hours or so. Definitely no new posts until tomorrow morning.
…. I had a Things I’d Like to Post About Today item that disappeared into thin air after I thought sure it was published.
Trust me, it was really good. :–>
I have no idea what happened to it.
As you were.
I’ll post it here at BizzyBlog on Saturday morning (link won’t work until then) under the title “California Draggin’: Its Basket-Case Economy and Bloated Welfare System Are Holding Back the US Economy” after the blackout expires.
Apparently BB was down for about three hours while I was out and about.
We’re back up, and I’m annoyed, but won’t bore with details. Those details will keep me from getting to the Trumpet post I planned until tomorrow.
A civic duty calls that may take up only a small part of the day, or the whole day.
UPDATE, 11:00 a.m.: It was jury duty. Many were called, and few were chosen. I was not among the chosen.
However, because of work on a longer assignment and some personal commitments, the potential post stack is shorter than normal. So there might not be a lot of new stuff until later in the day or in the evening.
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