Chuck's Heartland Website
Last updated: Wednesday, March 3rd, 1999
| My Family
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The Harding family makes it's home in Livermore,
California, which is aproximately 45 miles from San Fransisco in
eastern Alameda County.
Interesting things are going on in my family: My wife,
Katie,
is a full time employee at OOCL,
an international shipping company, but she is no longer working
for the documentation department, which OOCL relocated to it's
North Carolina facility. Instead, she is part of the team which is creating the IRIS II Shipping Management System, which replaces the older systems that are running on mainframe computers in Hong Kong with more up to date programs running on servers in the United States.
My oldest daughter,
Melinda,
and her new husband
André
got married on December 28th, 1996. They had the wedding
at St. Michael's Catholic church in Livermore, and
the
Elliston Winery,
in Sunol California was the site of their reception.
Click here for some pictures!
They are making their home in Livermore.
Melinda was working as a temp at Owens and Minor Co., but recently
got hired as a full time employee. She was working at
American Express Financial Services
in Walnut Creek but left because the commute was getting too onerous.
She's passed several tests to become a para-planner.
HOWEVER, she went on Maternity leave,
this past month, because they found out that they were expecting!
And, on October 19th, at 10:32 PM, Patrick André Miron
made his appearance at San Ramon Valley Medical Center. He
weighed in at 9lbs., 3oz. and was 20 3/4 inches long. The labor
took over 20 hours and included 2 hours of pushing, but because
of Patrick's position, finally resulted in the baby being
delivered by Caesarian Section.
André received many awards as a student at
San Jose State University,
graduated on May 25th, 1996, and is now working at a unit of
Underwriter's Laboratory
in Santa Clara, CA. He and Melinda have their own web site
here.
January 7th, 1997 would have been my son's 21st birthday,
if he had not decided on August 12th, 1993 to end his own life.
Christopher Ross Harding was an artistic, sensitive boy, on the edge
of becoming an adult, when, for unknown reasons, he became convinced that
killing himself would solve what he perceived to be an insurmountable
problem.
For the rest of the story, please click here.
If you're interested, click here for some
pictures of Chris...
My youngest daughter,
Zara,
was very busy attending
Las Positas College, here
in Livermore. Because of a flair-up of her childhood asthema, she has
had to change her plans. Although she had recieved two nominations from
our former representative, Bill Baker, and had been working with the
recruiters and liason officers to get an appointment to Annapolis, she
was denied the appointment because of the asthema and allergic rhinitus.
Her new plans are to finish up the next semester at Las Positas, then
transfer to San Jose State to get her degree in Chemical Engineering.
But then again, one of the liason officers for the Naval Acadamy has
convinced her to apply again and to try to get a waiver on the asthema.
So Zara has started to get serious about her physical conditioning by
taking three PE classes at Las Positas: Tai Kwan Do, Step Aerobics, and
Yoga. We'll see how this turns out - stay tuned.
Here's the latest on the Zara front: It seems as though love has
changed the situation, because Zara became pregnent with a due date of June 23rd. Her pregnancy was proceeding normally. But
as usual, there can't be anything "normal" associated with this family, because, on May 30th, 1998, at 11:17AM, Pacific time, my second grandson was born, 5 weeks premature at San Ramon Valley Hospital. Zara, was showing the beginning symptoms of toxemia and it was determined by her OB doctor that the most prudent course was to take the baby caesarian-section. This was done and everything seemed to be going fine. Then it was determined that the baby had a slight heart murmur, so he was sent to Children's Hospital in Oakland for tests, including an MRI and angiogram. The results of the tests showed that the problem was actually due to an arterio-veneous malformation (AVM) which is also called a hemangeoma, located in the baby's head, between the skull and brain, but not invasive into the brain. The doctors at Children's
Hospital, acknowleging their lack of experience in this area, determined that the best place to deal with the problem was at the neonatal unit at UC San Fransisco. So, another transfer. By this time the baby had been given a name: Kieran Alexander Harding. He was stabilized at Children's Hospital and was transferred to UCSF on Tuesday, June 2nd, and arrived without incident. A specialist was flown in from the UK that had a lot of
experience with the procedure that was planned, which was to insert platinum micro-coils, into the feeders of the AVM, to reduce the blood flow into it, and reduce the strain on Kieran's
heart. There's also a chance that the deliberate blockage will cause the AVM to atropy and shrink to the point where, at some later date, the entire mess could be removed using some sort of cryo-surgury, lasers, or conventional surgical techniques.
After two procedures, and 84 micro-coils inserted, Kieran has improved tremendeously, to the point that he has been taken off the respirator and is breathing on his own. The arterial catheter
was removed and Zara could finally hold her baby!! (June 9th) We
still don't know when Kieran will be allowed to come home but it's probably very soon because the staff at UCSF was briefing Zara about all the precautions that will have to be followed when he DOES come home, so it should be any day now.
Stay tuned for further developments!
We also co-habitate with Belle, a "Canine-American"
living with us, and enjoys eating, sleeping, and playing with
anyone that comes over for a visit. Well, thanks again
to André, who scanned the pictures for me, there are now
a picture of Bellehere.
cdharding at home dot net
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