Sometimes you surf the net and you don't know where the next click takes you. I read a posting in the newsgroup soc.culture.japan.moderated about a review at japanReview.net. The article's title in question was The Dave and Tony Show. Read the review what the two books are about - I can really recommend the second one to anyone who's married to a foreigner, but especially to Japanese readers. The review mentiones a guy named Olaf Karthaus. As this name sounds German, and since I'm a very curious person, I looked it up in Google. The top page listed in the results was a copyright form in German for a "Project Daniel". I moved two parent directories up and found The Daniel Project.

On first look, it was a memorial site for a child as I have read a few in the last several years. Then one sentence caught my eye: "Born with a severe congenital heart defect." That sounded familiar. When I was born, I was diagnosed with a ventricular septum defect, I was a blue baby with a little opening in the wall between my two lower heart chambers. My condition though was far less life-threatening than Daniels. In contrast to him, I didn't need any surgery. I wasn't allowed to participate in every sport event at school, but when I turned 14, my body seemed to have healed all by itself, the systolic murmur detected by cardiac auscultation in regular checkups was gone. I read the whole website, including the book about Daniel's life, his surgeries and his death. I can't remember when I have been so touched to tears by somebody's writing on the net. I haven't thought about it earlier, but now I'm a little bit worried whether our own baby will be healthy or not since there's an indication of a genetic link. Let's hope for the best, my wife's genes aren't as crappy as mine are.
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