Sixth Post

Sarah and her family begin to go up to their second home in Vermont every weekend. The kids love skiing with Bob and Sarah can spend time with her mother. It's the ultimate get away and allows the family some time away from school and work. Bob continually bugs Sarah about trying to ski again but Sarah just does not think she's ready. After being up there for several weekends, Sarah walks by NEHSA, New England Handicapped Sports. After talking to a friendly man that works there for a couple minutes, Sarah is deeply encouraged to try snowboarding with an assistant and gives in. As soon as Sarah is going up the mountain, she begins to feel nervous and regret her decision. She can't turn back now though. With her assistant Mike holding tightly onto her, she begins to go down the mountain. When they reach the bottom of the mountain, Mike asks Sarah how she feels. Sarah illustrates "I feel like Mike hurled a huge rock through the glass wall of my preconceptions, hitting it dead center, shattering my fear into a million glittery pieces on the snow around me." (Genova, 264) Sarah finally feels free and she is beyond grateful for what NEHSA did in her life. In my opinion, Sarah was very brave for giving snowboarding a try. It's hard to imagine how scary it would have been but I know that there is no way that I would get on a snowboard if I couldn't see anything to the left of me. However, Sarah did give it a try and it ended up being the best thing for her and practically set her free from her disability.  This quote is important to the novel because it is the point where Sarah finds herself again and accepts that she can do things that make her happy but maybe in a different way. This quote is significant to me because this is the first major time when Sarah does not let her disability defeat her.  She pushes herself and does not give up which is something that everyone should apply to their own lives.

Fifth Post

Over the next few months, Sarah slowly improves from where she started with her disability. She is beginning to realize when she needs to step back and allow someone to help her and when she must challenge herself to do something on her own. Although it still takes her 15 minutes to walk a couple blocks, Sarah will not let herself be labelled "handicap". Having her mother around for the first time in her life helped out a lot and made things easier for Bob, her husband. When Sarah was young, her brother died leaving her mother depressed and she never tried to get out of it. Sarah practically grew up without a mother and the last thing she wanted was her mother taking care of her now. She lost her chance to be in her life. However, over the months they spent together, her mother apologized to her and Sarah eventually was able to forgive her. She finally got to be with her mother, got to know her mother, and got to enjoy and love being with her. Her mother admits to Sarah that she prayed for some way back into her daughters life, but did not expect it to be in the way that it was with the accident. I think anyone would react to that situation in the same way that Sarah did. At first, it would be hard to let someone that made no effort to be in your life, back into it. Having all that confusion and hate for someone does not just go away right away. Sarah's mother did not give up on Sarah though as soon as she started helping her daughter with her Left Neglect. It was not easy but her mother needed a way back into her life and she did not want to throw away the chance no matter how hard it was. I think it was good that Sarah finally came around and forgave her mother because her mother was in fact, there for her when she needed her the most.  During those few months, Sarah and Bob decided to celebrate their anniversary at their favorite restaurant. As Sarah is sitting across the table from her husband, Bob gets an important message from his work that consumes his attention. Sarah thinks to herself, "the intrusion of work never bothered me in the past. Heck, a month ago, we'd both be sitting here with our heads down, bewitched by our phones, two avatars having dinner." (Genova, 194) This quote is important to the novel because it shows how Sarah is beginning to see how much work used to devour her family's lives. She is also starting to see how her accident is making her aware of how her old life used to be and how she had been missing out on simple things, like eating dinner with her husband, and seeing how important those little moments actually are. This quote is significant to me because I believe that sometimes we all need to just step back, turn off the cell phones, tune out the world, and just be with people and enjoy the company that surrounds us. Its hard to see sometimes what is all around us and how blessed we truly are.

FOURTH POST

Sarah has been spending the past few weeks in the hospital rehabilitating. She has been doing this in what her helpers call "the gym". There she has been working hard to exercise her brain and get it to recognize the left side of things by using a lot of bright colors. In the gym there was a poster that had a fist and the word attitude written on it and she allowed it to inspire her to get better. Despite all her hard work though, the hospital is sending her home. She should be happy to go home to her family but she's not. She knows that by them sending her home she hasn't gotten any worse but she also hasn't gotten a whole lot better. This is devastating for Sarah. If I was in Sarah's place, I think I would be devastated as well. I would be angry at first knowing that I still had so far to go to be fully recovered. Then I think panic would start to set in knowing that I maybe suck with an awful disability such as Left Neglect my whole  life. Personally, giving up seems so much easier, but it also sounds way more frustrated. Thankfully one of Sarah's helpers reminds her that she is even lucky to be alive. On Sarah's last visit to the gym she takes another look at the poster and realizes something. "The picture on the poster is of two hands, not one... And the word above the hands in red letters isn't Attitude. The word about the holding hands is Gratitude." (Genova, 167) This is important to the novel because as Sarah realizes how lucky she is to even be alive, it allows her left neglect to weaken and opens her eyes to what she had never seen before. This is significant to me because I think it can relate to everyone. If everyone learns to appreciate what they have and be thankful, maybe our eyes will be completely opened to things that have always been there be we have been too stubborn to allow ourselves to see.

THIRD POST

After a couple weeks, Sarah is able to keep from going in and out of consciousness. The doctor notifies her and her husband that she now has a disability known as Left Neglect. This is common to patients that suffer damage to the right-hemisphere and it basically makes it so that the left side of everything doesn't exist to her. If someone is standing to the left of her, Sarah won't see them. She can only draw half of a portrait of someones face, all the while she is seeing a complete face through her eyes. In this part of the book, Sarah has changed drastically. She goes from being a work all day every day to not even being able to look at her phone. She also goes from being able to be independent, being able to walk, and being able to do day to day activities with her family to lying in bed and having to try to concentrate enough to even wiggle the toes on her left foot. Sarah is a woman that never stops fighting and won't give up, so she'll be able to be back at work hopefully within the next week right? She still manages to think that she sees things properly and hasn't fully realized what has happened to her body. At one point in the book Sarah says to her husband "Bob, I know I have a left hand, but I have no idea where it is." (Genova, 77) This is important to the novel because it reveals to the reader just how serious Sarah's condition is and how much is could affect her life if she never gets better. The quote is significant to me because everyone takes for granted that their bodies work the way they are suppose to and however we want them to work, and we don't even realize how hard it would be to live if we couldn't see, use, or comprehend the "left side" of anything. It makes me appreciate that I'm healthy and able to do the things I love.

Second Post

Its pouring rain on Sarah's way to work. She's finally going to be early for once since her husband took the kids this morning. She grabs her phone from her bag and decides to get ahead of the game before she even gets to work and attempts to start making her phone calls. Sarah doesn't see that the rest of the traffic has stopped though, and but the time she does, its too late. She's hydroplaning. The author acknowledges that "Something hits [her] head." (Genova, 64) The last thing she can remember before she wakes up in the hospital is hearing the sound of the rain hitting the roof of her car. When I read this part of the book, I could barely breath. I couldn't imagine being in that situation, and actually watch your life whirl around you and just hope that you survive. One minute its just like any other day, get up, get ready, and go to work. The next minute, all you can do is try and stay awake by focusing on the sound of the rain. When I was younger, I was moving things around in my room and had to plug something into an outlet. I was having troubles plugging whatever it was into the outlet and as I gave it one last shove I saw the outlet begin to spark. All I could think to myself was "I'm dead" as I shot backwards a foot or two. I think that my situation was similar to what Sarah experienced right before her car crashed as she was hydroplaning. There are those few seconds where you realize that something bad is happening and can not see or hear anything and only think that this could be the end. The quote that I picked is important to the novel because I believe that something happened when she hit her head. In my opinion, it wouldn't be there if it didn't have a purpose to the story. It is significant to me because it was the line in the book that made me realize that something was really wrong. It was where me, being the reader, figured out that it wasn't just a minor accident or that her car just spun a little. It was the point of the book that I had been waiting for, not quite in that way though, where Sarah's life was going to be turned upside down.

First Post

Sarah Nickerson is a young woman that has a husband and three kids. She has a well paying, challenging job that always keeps her on her toes whether its checking her hundreds of emails, making phone calls, or sitting through long meetings. She barely has time for anything, but work. Keeping all three of her kids under control just adds to the level of stress that she receives from work on a daily basis. Compared to me, Sarah is very different. For me, work comes after everything and is something that I do so that I can have a little extra cash. For Sarah, she'd be lost without her job. It's what keeps their life where its at. It is, however, hard to compare me to Sarah since she's a lot older than I am. If I was in her position though, I wouldn't want to be as high up in her job as she is. It consumes too much of her in my opinion, and when I have kids, I want to be part of their lives and not be glad to have someone else at home to take care of them since I'm never home. Sarah shows her appreciation towards their nanny, Abby but saying "She became an essential member of our family. I can't imagine our life without her." (Genova, 16) This quote is important to the novel because it shows how much Sarah already depends on someone else for help. It also shows that all she really knows is her job since someone else has always been taking care of everything else. This quote is significant to me because it makes me wonder what would happen if she were to lose Abby. It makes me think that her life could be turned upside down at any moment.