Living With Stiff Person Syndrome

"The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame."
~Charles Caleb Colton~

Stephen was a beloved friend and my SPS mentor. He shared with me, and many others, his ample knowledge and medical resources about SPS. He was our "professor." By example, Stephen lived proactively with SPS combining wit, perseverance, and humor. He was one of the first to help me understand this rare disorder, living with his SPS diagnosis for over 30 years. He was an outreach to others, devoted to research, and a willing participant in studies.

Stephen saw a correlation with his following photograph and Stiff Person Syndrome, sharing his observation in a support list email. I dedicate Stephen's photograph to his memory and this page as a memorial for those who have deeply touched my life, if only for a season. Remembering Stephen as he lived, "My Way."

The inline photo below -- 'Maybe.jpg' -- is my take of a camelia bush in front of our house one wet spring ago. It's between the carport slab and the driveway, and I digitized it with my Olympus D520Z camera in May of 2003, as a see-what-I-mean visual aid now put to use.

One nearly expiring blossom seemed to be escaping through the surrounding fence trap, and that appealed to a sensibility of mine. Call it sympathy.

I would never see it just that way again. In a few days I could come back and rig it close to being that way; but to me that would match the documentary integrity of Matthew Brady, Civil War photographer and Lincoln portraitist. For composition and effect, he rearranged the warm bodies of blue & grey in sundry recent battlefields. Life ain't perfect, and that's just the way it should stay. I did use Photoshop, though, to nuke a few errant pixels. Call me hopeful.

For physical scale, the top of the focal wooden pole supporting the fence is 4 inches wide and two feet off the ground. Let me know if there's no pole there... 8-O

Photo copyright © 2003 by Stephen Hyde
Camelia japonic

(Feel what I meant?)

All the best,

Stephen

"The Buddha rests quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha -- which is to demean oneself."