"Live is so beautiful"

It is a pleasure for me to still be here. About four years ago I had a stroke and an Aneurysm ("blood in the brain"). From one day to the "next" my live completely changed. From a workaholic to someone who was no longer able to work. Who had to learn reading, writing and math again. I am still in this phase, but now many things happened. 

During the first two years I was very busy trying to learn the "ABC" and the fundamentals of math again. This all is still in the process. All is getting better, but it is very slow. Once you have finished you school education it seems like it was always there. But when you lost part of your brain, you recognize how long and difficult it is to get all this done again. 

At the beginning I couldn't handle a computer. After about one year I was able to start working with the computer again. It were the basics which I had to learn again. How to click the mouse or trying to write some characters. Then after some time I was able to work for my rehabilitation on computers. I was using "Cogpack" during that time. Every day a couple of hours. But still I couldn't to anything else. 

Then at the beginning of 2008 I started to write down my experiences with my disease. Writing a chapter in English and German at that time took about one day. But it was an important and good step. If you are interested in this you find that in www.aneurysma.org. As I said it was very difficult, but it was an important step! On the one hand I had to do the writing and on the other hand I had to learn HTML again. During that period I also started working on a couple of web-pages. My brain and memory is still very limited in its capacity, but everyday I am improving a little bit. Small steps, but constantly steps. At the beginning I couldn't read a sentence, now at least I can read, write and understand a sentence. As I said, the amount of memory that I have available at a time is still very limited, but the important is that it is constantly improving. 

I did the following we pages in the meantime: 

www.vrtainment.de
www.capturepad.com
www.vr-soccer.de
www.aneurysma.org
www.hartwig-distler.de
www.ezelheim.de

At the beginning it were only small changes, now changes are getting bigger and more extensive. I am doing now entire new sites. At the moment I also added some Javascripts. 

For a long time I was trying every month to do C++ again. But I always failed. This was still to complex for my brain. But now I finally made the step. Especially at the beginning it was very difficult, but now my brain seems to have enough capacity. It is still very difficult and I lost most of my previous knowledge (time before my sickness), but finally I managed it. I am very happy that I managed this step. As I said, everything is very slow in my brain and I am writing only simple applications, but I like that very much. 

In the next couple of week I will from time to time report about that. 

... I can't repeat it too often: Life is very beautiful and it is a great pleasure to still be here. 

During my sickness I often had difficulties to recognize numbers correctly. Making a difference between what you are saying and thinking.