A Medical Test We're Actually Looking Forward To!

This week, Danny is getting an EEG to monitor the progress of his seizures. Not because they've gotten worse, but because they haven't recurred at all in about two years, despite an increase in his body weight with no increase in the dosage of his medication. This is good news. Depending on the outcome of the EEG, Danny may be able to stop taking his medication in the near future.

In other news, the dryer is fixed, and so we are playing catch-up with laundry, which when you are a family of five is a lot of washing and drying. In addition to discovering the expense of laundromats, I also made a couple of other discoveries in my repair adventure.

One is that the inside of a dryer is filthy! The lint gets everywhere it's not supposed to be. The more places I looked, the more places I found where lint and dirt and the things that fall out of kids' pockets can get our of the drum and into the rest of the dryer. I'm going to make a habit of cleaning the inside of that machine every six months or so.

Another thing I discovered is that service manuals are written for people who don't really need them. For the rest of us, it is a labyrinth of cross-referencing steps that aren't actually cross-referenced. For example, to remove the drum, you have to remove the front panel, and the manual tells you just that. But it doesn't tell you how to remove the front panel unless you go back to the table of contents (no index) and find the page that tells you how to take off the front panel. How do you take off the front panel? Easy, you just take off the control panel, exposing the screws for the front panel. How do you remove the control panel? Back to the table of contents.

But I did get it apart, and back together again (the part came the very next day from an online dealer in Albany, NY). At first the dryer started as soon as I put the plug in the wall, which should never happen. That turned out to be a foreign substance in the button that starts the dryer. When I blew that out, everything worked just the way it's supposed to. No one was more surprised than me.

I will report on the outcome of Danny's EEG sometime in early June. And if anything else interesting happens, as it's sure to with the Brooks Bunch, you find it here.

If I can find the time.