"Don't give up Joseph, fight till you drop
We've read the book, and you come out on top"
- Go, Go, Go Joseph (Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat)

The ten months I spent in recovery with my family brought us all together like never before. Many nights we gathered together to play games, like Scrabble® or Yahtzee®. As you can imagine, such activities not only furthered my mental recovery by causing me to think, to strategize, and to follow rules, they also helped me socially by allowing me to interact with my family. We enjoyed so many laughs during those family times - like when I accidentally mixed in some "word salad" into a Scrabble® game. (Word-salad is a mixture of seemingly meaningful words that together signify nothing.)

I may have had a dysfunctional memory, but the accident had done nothing to quell my competitive drive. I sometimes made up words, insisting they were real. On one particular occasion, I created a long word containing no vowels, placed it on "Triple Word Score" squares, and challenged my mom to look it up in the dictionary. Of course, she couldn't find it, and when she told me, I responded matter of factly, "It must be because Webster doesn't know about it yet." My brother, who is even more competitive then I am, chuckled and told my mom to just give me the word. "I mean, part of his brain was on his sleeve for crying out loud," he quipped.

From Ch. 3 of Mile Marker 825 (www.MileMarkerBook.com)