Hi Everyone,
It was a long busy weekend. I wasn’t planning on taking the weekend off from journaling but unfortunately our Friday-Sunday nurse caught a bug and called out.
We weren’t alone all weekend. JohnPaul visited Saturday and Caitlin came home Sunday. Corey also had a visit with some of her girlfriends that are home on spring break. It was a nice respite for both of us.
On the weekends we still keep to our schedule; PT, OT and Speech twice a day for an hour each. Corey hasn’t advanced in the stander more than once a day nor has she been able to stand longer than 11 minutes without showing signs of fatigue. However, she did want to show off for her brother and managed to set this weekend’s record for standing to 15 minutes. Normally Corey is significantly shorter than her brother, but in the stander she is almost as tall as he is. I think she enjoyed looking at him eye to eye more than the achievement of standing for a new record. (Check out the gallery)
Corey’s speech is improving a little more each day. She is initiating questions, trying to speak in full sentences and if we can’t understand her, she is trying to spell the word for us. Corey tries to enunciate her words but several of the consonants and vowel sounds are still slurred (much like a stroke victim). If we ask her to slow down as she verbalizes her word or sentence, sometimes it’s clearly audible. Other times we have to ask her to write it down. Recently she opts to spell the word she’s expressing. This is a comical exchange especially when she talks with Caitlin. Corey actually can’t complete the spelling of a word without laughing. It appears that we are so focused on reading her lips we are not aware of the contorted facial expressions we are making trying to sound out the word with her. She laughs at how funny we look trying to decipher what she’s saying. Needless to say, we laugh more than we talk to one another. By the time we stop laughing, she forgets what she’s trying to spell. It’s a good thing there are no hidden camera’s for America’s funniest home “reality” show!
Speaking of Reality…
The online petition is growing by the day. In less than 5 days, there are 730 names. Senator Pileggi has received so many phone calls and letters that his office was calling the township today to discuss the details of the intersection. The office actually called one of the authors that penned a note. Jennifer was an EMT in this area for sometime. She shared her experience with emergency response calls to this intersection. At first Pileggi’s office was going to send out a questionnaire to the Franklin Township residents, but Jennifer explained that it’s not just the residents of Franklin that travel this road. Anyone that commutes through this intersection on a daily basis is at risk. There are several thousand people that have had near misses and accidents that didn’t require police, fireman or EMT’s that statistics would never document. Furthermore, the time of day does not factor into the equation either. Corey’s accident was at 1:08am. Two weeks ago a sedan and RV collided at 3:50pm.
The Chester County Press wrote a beautiful article about Corey last week. This week Part 2 will discuss the details of the intersection. We will be hosting a rally at the intersection on Saturday March 24th from 4:30-6pm. We will post the details for parking as soon as they are confirmed (we’re hoping to use Cornerstone Presbyterian’s lot). It is our hope that PennDot’s engineers will attend and the Senator and Governor will investigate our pleas for a traffic light and grant state funding.
If you have had personal experience, near misses and/or an accident at this intersection, could you please sign our petition? I would also like to ask that you take a moment to briefly describe your experience on the petition page. We will be sending this to the PennDot engineers, Senator and Governor. This is OUR survey to document Real Statistics for this intersection. If there were a four way stop and/or a traffic light 16 months ago, I’m sure Corey would be preparing something much different at Johnson & Wales instead of Monday’s cooking therapy in New London. For those of you who are local, we hope you will join Corey on March 24th. Let’s fight together to keep everyone safe as they travel this road.