Hi, my name is Kat. I joined a 31 day blog-post-a-day challenge (the WordCount Blogathon Challenge) and…missed the very first day.

Oops.

And now that I’ve negated my eligibility for actually saying I completed said challenge, I’ll try to go 30 days in a row writing a post.

Sure, posting once a day on all three of my personal sites in the month of May when I still work full-time in higher education is rather self-punishing. If I get through it, I’ll be a better writer for the experience. In addition, it’ll help me write substantive material every day, something I feel empty not doing. But it is something I go without doing too often.

Writing something once a day means I may have to branch out beyond sports, which I hope my more sports minded followers will not mind. One topic I will be writing about in May will be that this month is National Stroke Awareness Month, a topic very near and dear to my heart. My grandfather (who taught me a lot of my sports knowledge, including an extremely useful base level knowledge of NASCAR) suffered numerous strokes between 1991 and 2002. Just about two weeks ago, my own mother (who is only in her early fifties) suffered her own stroke. My mom is well on her way to recovery – luckily, her stroke was mild, and she’s already back on her feet after a few days in the hospital.

The general public doesn’t talk enough about stroke – in fact, it seems like it’s only mentioned when we talk about the late Dick Clark, and then, it’s shrugged off. We forget that it can strike the very young and very fit (like former New England Patriot Tedy Bruschi), and that if you are vigilant, you can treat a stroke before it causes significant damage. We also overlook that research has provided us with immensely better ways to treat stroke in the past twenty or so years – the advances in treatment from my grandfather’s first stroke and his later ones were noticeable, and is has improved more since the early 2000s.

So in between the sports and social media related posts I will write in May, I am going to talk about stroke – how you can prevent it, how we can work together to further the research and how many stroke victims have successful recoveries. I promise not to get preachy – I just hope that I can use the small platform I have to help others.