@ Eric... Nate is like lightening! Heck NO I cant keep up with his texting. I think he must have one of those 3 or 4 G phones with the full keyboard. He writes a paragraph and my phone gets 3 or 4 texts at a time on its tiny little screen. Everytime Im in the middle of typing a reply, BOOM here comes another one and it kicks me out of my text. Makes me even slower then. Nate is the younger generation who has grown up having a cell phone from the time he was like 10 years old. I got my first cell phone when I was 35, makes for quite a big learning curve!

Back to the original topic. Nate is doing very very well considering everything he has gone thru. His surgery was very drastic and his life will now be forever changed. I cant imagine what he must be going thru learning to live his life without a voice, not even a whisper. Nate will need our support weather he feels like he does now or not. I speak from my experience in a similar situation. I woke up 3 week after I went in for the mandibulectomy terribly disfigured and all pieced together. I had no idea what had happened, I went to sleep on August 24th and woke up September 13th. It felt like I had taken a short nap. It took me quite a while to mentally process what had happened while I was kept asleep. Adjusting to such a sudden dramatic change is not easy to adapt to. It really took alot of deep thinking before I was able to pick myself up, brush the dust off and walk out the door with my head held high. I hope I am able to help Nate work thru this point in his life. He still has 5 weeks of rads to do before he can begin to put this all behind him and move on.

If anyone would like to send Nate a card, please PM me for his address.