Leon Brooks Update

Another update from the PLUG list:

Leon was taken off the sedation on Saturday and has been waking up slowly since then. As you can imagine, this is a slow process because of the nature of the injuries and the level of morphine he is on. He was put in a chair/bed for a while today so he could be in a different position. He required support, but opened one eye slightly and was able to look at Lucy and move his head to see. He was responding to pain stimulus on his hands and feet yesterday, but today he has improved to respond to a more gentle touch on his feet, and squeezed people’s hands with his when requested (after a few seconds pause). He still has a tube down his throat, but the assisted breathing has been turned off – he is now breathing on his own!

Leon Brooks Update

Update from PLUG:

Author: Alex Polglaze
Date: 2006-02-28 13:09 +1100
Subject: [plug] LEON BROOKS UPDATE

This is an update of Leon Brooks’s current situation.

Leon is in Royal Perth Hospital in a medically induced coma. He currently has a chest infection and the doctors are fighting that. They expect that it will be another 4-5 days before they can reduce the sedation sufficiently and assess the brain and spinal damage.

He is expected to be in Intensive Care for another 4-5 weeks and therefore cannot receive any flowers during this time. Also Lucy is not at home much, so please hold the flowers.

Currently, babysitting, transport and meal preparation and supply are under control.

[…]

Lucy thanks everybody for the well wishes and support and is mentioning everybody as she talks to Leon.

So keep thinking of him and hopefully he will recover.

Alex Polglaze

Here is a probably related ABC news item from Sunday.

Hang in there Leon…

Leon Brooks in Intensive Care After Car Crash

Bad news reported in a message to the PLUG list:


Date: 2006-02-27 13:54 +1100
To: plug
Subject: [plug] leon brooks

It is my sad duty to inform you all that Leon Brooks had a car accident on Saturday night and has severe head injuries and is currently in ICU.

Further details are sketchy at this stage.

🙁

Leon, I hope you make a speedy and thorough recovery. Get well soon.

Via Linux Australia

The Jumbled Jigsaw arrives!

Well the author copies of Donna’s 9th published book The Jumbled Jigsaw have arrived with a fab cover featuring a lovely painting by Donna called the Music of Beingness!

Hopefully it’ll stir up the autism field into realising that there is far more diversity in the causes of the symptoms that get labelled as “Autism” and that a diagnosis of autism confers no magic resistance to things like Tourettes, OCD, bipolar or anything else that the rest of the population gets.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Internet Explorer..

To expand briefly on this story of Leon’s about the problems with security in Internet Explorer I will add a quote from the source article:


Actually there was only one period in 2004 when there were no publicly known remote code execution bugs – between the 12th and the 19th of October – 7 days in total.

So for 359 of the 366 days of 2004 (it was a leap year) users of Internet Explorer were vulnerable to being hacked..
I await their figures for 2005 with interest!

51st State

Aha, so Leon thinks Canada is the 51st state, but New Model Army have been claiming that for the UK since 1986 by the look of it.. 🙂


Our star-spangled Union Jack flutters so proud
Over the dancing heads of the merry patriotic crowd
Tip your hat to the Yankee conqueror
We’ve got no reds under the bed with guns under our pillows

If you’ve never heard them before then give them a listen, especially their earlier stuff. Got to be one of my favourite bands!