To answer the question that I'm sure you've been wondering, yes, I did fall off the face of the earth in a sense!! Hehe. For more info, you can send me an e-mail, but today is the only day I can check for a few more weeks. So, here's the short version: as I mentioned in my last post, I was feeling a bit under the weather at the time. Well the following Sunday I woke up with some strange symptoms which did not go away overnight. After going to the doctor the next day I was sent immediately to the hospital, where I underwent so many tests and got transferred to another hospital with a neurological department, and after a week of worsening symptoms (numbness, nausea, weakness/partial body and facial paralysis, headaches among other things) I was diagnosed with Miller Fisher Syndrome, an autoimmune syndrome that occurs usually if your body gets too run down with a virus infection. I was then in the ICU for 5 days (my mom flew over at this point and is still here, thankfully) where they began with immunogobin therapy which stopped my body from sending antibodies to eat my nerves. Luckily that helped (and thanks only to people who donated plasma) and th worst was over - I was happy they found out what I had before it got too much worse and was happy that it is very usual that with this rare syndrome patients get back 100% with time - just a matter of time and lots of patience once the therapy is done. So now it has been over 1.5 months that I've been in the hospital and am now at a rehab clinic for physical therapy since I have lost a bit of muscle mass/weight and still have numbness overall. It's not possible to say how much longer I'll be here, but for now they're hoping for 3 weeks since I've made so much progess with eating and strength/walking in the past few weeks (I've been impressing my doctors and therapists ;) ). And today is the first day that I've been able/allowed to leave, so I went to my horn prof's house to get away and have some real food! (trust me, hospital food in Germany is not any better than what I've heard of it in the States - I swear I ate stuff that looked like poop and hot chocolate pudding soup for weeks on end when I couldn't swallow well!). So I've been making good progress, I'll be able to get a vacation semester to get back in shape, and there is no reason at this point to think that with time I won't be back to normal. So I've had a bit of a break from everything and have had help from my wonderful horn prof and friends and family and am thankful for the people who donated plasma! Anyway, it's been pretty hot here and of course there's no AC here (even in the hospital - strange!), but a nice afternoon soda and ice cream do the trick! Hope your summers are going well, and greetings from the forest clinic in Jesteburg (right outside Hamburg), named after the weevil (not like something in friendly like in the States, ha)!