Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

quick update to previous post

Things looking better and better with my mom as the day progressed today-- language and reading pretty much all back to normal, amazingly.  What it's looking like is that the chemotherapy from her breast cancer treatments caused some damage to the blood vessels in her brain, making her especially susceptible to something like this, and fortunately the stroke was very minor and the quick treatment got rid of whatever clot there was and so nothing's even showing up as damage on the MRI.  She'll probably need to be on blood thinners to try and do whatever's possible to lower the risk of another stroke, but for now feeling pretty lucky that there's no lasting damage and she should be okay from this.

my mom

The post I wanted to write was about finishing up a book proposal on Thursday that I've been spending a whole bunch of the past few weeks working on, and now it's in my agent's inbox and hopefully will get a good response.

Instead, I'm writing a different post.  My mom had what appears to be a small stroke yesterday.  Fortunately, my stepdad recognized quickly what was going on and rushed her to the hospital and they were able to give her an clot-busting medication that will hopefully limit the damage.  She seems to be doing well-- no motor deficits at all, memory seems ok for now, and there's just some small language issues-- having some trouble saying all the words she wants to say, and sometimes the speech comes out garbled, and some similar trouble with reading.  But it got noticeably better as the hours passed post-medication, and she seemed more like herself last night, and was able to read a little bit-- the problem seeming like it's less about understanding what she's reading than about reading it aloud, so that's good.  Apparently the stroke-- they're assuming at this point it was a stroke unless they find evidence otherwise-- was small enough that it wasn't coming up on the first read of the MRI-- but they're doing more tests to figure out what happened, why it happened, and the best ways to avoid something similar or worse happening again.

It feels a little bizarre that only about a year after my grandma's stroke, my mom has something similar and hitting what seems like a similar area of the brain-- my grandma had this same word-finding problem in the hours and days after the stroke, until we started to realize the problem ran deeper than that and her memory was really quite affected.  But her stroke was very much visible on the scans and so hopefully that means my mom's was much, much smaller and won't leave her with the same kinds of memory issues and inability to be independent that my grandma has unfortunately had to deal with.

The plausible theory is that my mom's breast and kidney cancers over the past couple of years made her blood more likely to coagulate-- apparently an issue with people who've had cancer-- and thus more susceptible to something like this.

But fingers crossed that the damage is minimal and it'll resolve itself over the next few days, especially because we were able to get her the clot-busting drug quickly.

She thought she was out of the woods post-the cancer stuff over the past few years, but it just seems like it never really ends.  Hearing Nina's stories from work, and really just as we get to an age where parents get older, it seems like for everyone, sadly, a good part of life ends up being about dealing with illness, yours or others.  And it sucks.  For everyone.

That was a fairly incoherent paragraph, but maybe there's a point there somewhere.

Anonymous Lawyer in Hebrew

The Israeli edition of Anonymous Lawyer came out last week.  A reporter for the newspaper Ha'aretz interviewed me for an article that came out today.  Here's the link to the Google Translate version.  It's not a perfect translation, but it's kind of neat to read.

My favorite poorly-translated excerpts:

"In December 2004 an article appeared in The New York Times on the hot blog anonymous.  Over the weekend he received more than 500 miles," he says. "Many of them were dangerous literary publishers."

"There are many people economic security in return or at least a sense of financial security , doing things in the end very rewarding. except for their salaries is not that great reward, therefore no time to waste the money or to enjoy it. They have this gear tooth."

UPDATED: My publisher just told me it's teased on the front page of Ha'aretz!

Another WSJ Law Blog Piece

Another piece in the WSJ Law Blog, this time a response to Working Mother's list of the 50 Best Law Firms For Women. 

The real list is here.

So if you need law firm-related satire, or have any other satire needs... feel free to reach out.  :)

Crazy commercial

I just saw a commercial for Nutella, where there's a mom and she says, "as a mom, I'm concerned about healthy foods for my kids.  that's why I use Nutella to get my kids to eat healthy.  I spread it on all kinds of things.  And I know it's made with quality ingredients, like hazelnuts, and milk, and cocoa."

This is a screwy commercial.  Nutella is not a health food.  And just because you can spread it on a rice cake doesn't make it healthy.  You can spread lard on healthy foods too.  Crazy.

WSJ Law Blog

Check out a piece of mine just posted on the Wall Street Journal's law blog-- a mock layoff memo from a fictional law firm, inspired by all the start date deferrals and summer associate program canceling that seems to be going on in the law firm world.

Here's the link to the piece.  Check it out.

A Few Wedding Pics

Photos courtesy of Conrad Erb, whose pictures we were really happy with and you should totally use him if you're getting married.