Saturday 3 January 2015

No. 137. Laughter is the best medicine.

Yesterday we visited Chris's dad. It was lovely to catch up again. While Tom was having a doze in the afternoon Chloe helped Chris practice his speech software on his tablet. (This is the demo version, they are coming with the proper computer and programme on Wednesday.)

Chris is practicing using the on screen keyboard and more importantly to use the predictive text. He has also been building up useful phrases in separate data banks, such as 'Help' and 'Opinions'. Chloe jumped in with helping Chris. Her first attempt at typing a phrase for him was the first two lines of ' I have a brand new combine harvester.' which caused lost of laughter, especially when the 'speak' tab was pressed. The afternoon then consisted, in between helping Chris to type some sensible phrases like 'I'd like a drink please', for example, to them typing song lyrics and silly phrases and listening to the computer pronounce them. Getting the software to speak NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN batman, was hilarious as it sounded more like a machine gun. I spotted Tom smiling while he was dozing though all of this.

Anyway, a fun afternoon was had between father and son and father and daughter. We also laughed at Tom and Chris because between Chris's slurry speech and Tom being hard of hearing, there were some funny misunderstandings of what Chris was saying. Well you have to laugh don't you?

When we were chatting in bed later, and we do talk about, hopefully, the far future, that I would need to find work when I was on my own as I would need to support myself and I didn't want to be stuck at home alone all the time anyway. Of course I said that what I really wanted was for us to go into old age together. What was needed was a cure that would halt MND in it's tracks and then he and I could grow old together hopefully with just his limp and PEG as a reminder. I then got very silly as it made me think of Long John Silver for some reason and we laughed some more. I know this stuff is only funny to us, but we really do have to find the funny side of this hateful disease.

There is no real treatment for MND so laughter really has to be the best medicine.