GBE Reincarnated week One: LOSS

I am so happy to see that the GBE (Group Blogging Experience) is starting up again. It was a major Loss to Bloggers when Alicia retired the series way back in 2009. (I think?)

I don’t think it was too long after that when Myspace killed their blogging platform and bloggers scattered to blog sites all over the world wide web. Most sites required you to have a user name and password just to read the blogs. Heck, I tried several blog sites myself. I finally landed on the Blogger platform.

It was difficult to keep up with blogs that were all over the internet. My blogging desire kinda faded away. Part of the fun in writing blogs is getting feedback on them, good, bad or indifferent. At least you knew somebody had read the words that where thrown into the abyss of cyberspace.

So now I have to decide if I am going to blog on Blogger (where people I know in real life can read it) or use the new SpaceHey platform and enjoy the freedom of anonymity. Maybe a little of both just to keep it complicated.

I usually try to keep things light and fun when I blog. This week the GBE subject is Loss, so I am not even going to try to keep it fluffy.

LOSS

I’m pretty sure 2020 turned out to be a year of Loss for everyone.

It certainly was for me.

Before 2020 I was self employed and made custom cabinets and vending décor. Almost all of my work goes into commercial public places like company break areas and cafeterias. 2019 ended with me completing one of the largest jobs I had ever done in my solo career. Oh, did I mention that I am a company of one? I quote, design, engineer, build, deliver and install all my jobs all by my little lonesome self. (I would post a photo here but Spacehey requires having a photo on the web to post)

After that job I felt a little tired but just thought it was because it was a busy year. January hit and let’s face it, who feels peppy in January?

Then my stomach started hurting. In my usually “let’s wait and see if it goes away or I die” manner of handling health issues, it was a month before I bothered to make a doctors appointment.

Quite a few tests later, it was decided that I had several stomach ulcers. I got some drugs and that started to fade away. I was still feeling more tired than my usual lazy self. So I made finally made another doctors appointment.

About the second week of March Covid hit. By the third week, my business phone calls and emails dropped to zero. Nada. Zilch. It was as if the world just stopped. This actually turned out to be as good thing, because I was getting so tired and winded, that I don’t think I could have done a job.

Because of the Covid, it was difficult to get doctors appointments. Try to make an appointment? Four weeks. Try to get a test done? Four weeks. Get those results back? Four weeks. Set an appointment with the doc to talk about those results? Yep. Four weeks. It was about the middle of June before the tests determined that I had a blocked heart artery. By then, I felt like I was running on about 25% of my life battery.

It was almost….wait for it….three weeks before they could get me scheduled to have a heart stent put in. A few days before surgery, my back seizes up and I can barely walk. I am pretty sure the reason I had the ulcers was because I was eating Ibuprofen, so that option was out for the back pain.

More doctors visits and tests with the four week period between each one.

Long story short... (I know, too late for that.) Because of the back issues I spent a lot of time in bed when I should have been doing cardio therapy.(which, because of Covid, I couldn’t get scheduled until August)

As a result of not moving much, my weight dropped from 285 to 210 over a matter of six months. I weighed 220 in high school. Most of the weight loss was muscle mass.

Almost a year after the first stent, probably because I wasn’t getting much movement, I would need another. A year after that, they gave up on stents and did a triple bypass. That was fun.

I now feel like I am running at about 45%. I have only done a couple of small jobs since 2020 and they required a lot more effort than normal. Fortunately, I was old enough to start drawing Social Security. So the last few years haven’t been a total LOSS.

I’m not writing this to get sympathy, just stating facts.

However, If you are going to tell me how handsome, smart and talented I am, ya’ better do it quick, haha!