Ok, back to the story

In the summer of 2006, Heidi was having some trouble cutting the girls fingernails. It was troubling to her, but we didn't think all that much about it at the time. She hiked a 14'er with her friend, she worked out 4 or 5 days a week at 5am, etc. I noticed that she seemed to stay sore longer after her workouts, and she commented that she was slowing down in some of the "boot camp" style days. Again, with no frame of reference, we didn't really think anything serious was wrong.

That fall, we signed the Girls up to the "Bombers" program in Breckenridge for the ski season. Bombers is a great program where each girl is paired off with other kids their age and they each have one teacher for 7 ski weeks out of eight starting the first week in January of 2007. One of the great things about this program is that mom and dad ALSO get a free ski day because all the kids are off with their teachers on the same mountain. The girls were just now all old enough to do this, so we were feeling a bit lucky and with our mountain house 20 minutes from Breck, we had a great convenience factor built in to the deal.

So, we were SO stoked. Amazingly stoked. The stars were alligned for a great ski season.

Everything was going pretty well, but as the season went on, while the girls were awesome and getting great "marks"from their teachers, H was noticing that she was having a harder time doing simple things. I was carrying the skis, buckling the buckles, clamping the boots, etc. H just couldn't do it. Her hands were "locking up" in the cold. There were a few times when she fell that she couldn't get up without help. Towards the end of the ski season, we were skiing at Keystone with family and on the last run, Heidi fell off the chairlift because she couldn't get off of it at the top. She literally could not stand up at the right time. She was going to ride the gondola down from there, but it was closed so she skiied. We had to support her for a good part of the way down that last portion of the slope. It was pretty scary, and was probably the main reason we went to see the first neurologist in March.