I'm Back ...

Well, I'm back.

Had quite an eventful five weeks or so. Not anything I'd like to relive, mind you, nothing pleasant, but both eye-opening and, yes, life-changing. What happened?

I'm not prepared to write about it. Yet. But I spent twenty days in three different hospitals for a very, very serious illness, one that was initially misdiagnosed (as lung cancer, of all things). I suffered through some mighty lows, but with the support of family, friends, and clergy, I was able to make it through and get home. Battered and bruised, still taking pain medication, living each day one day at a time, and monitoring my health to the best of my ability, because the doctors have absolutely no clue whether or not I'll have a relapse.

So much work to do, and so little energy to do it with. The pain meds make me tired, and the days home from the hospital (going on two weeks now) just whirl by. Tomorrow I'm scheduled to go in to my place of business to meet with my bosses. I have no idea how that's going to go, so I'm trying not even to think about it. I have doctors to call, lawyers to contact, taxes to get filed, paperwork to wade through (almost literally - the basement office flooded while I was hospitalized), writings to finish, emails to compose, and, yes, of course, plenty of books to read.

Over the course of the past five weeks I've had many thoughts and many ideas to blog on, and I'll get to them, as I have in the past, one post per day. There's a short-story-possibly-something-more-lucrative project that I've pretty much written in my head, so now I need to spend a dozen or so hours getting it all out on the laptop. A lot of topics to brainstorm, from practical ditties such as how to make more money in this day and age to other writing projects such as completing the outline to the next novel to long-range life stuff like what I want to do when I grow up. Fun stuff, if I can get my drugged-up behind off the couch.

I didn't do any reading in the hospital other than a concise catechism of the Catholic Church. That means that my previous work-in-progress, Shogun, has been put indefinitely on hold, for the simple fact that I jes' plum forgot everything that I read before my hospitalization. When I got out, I finished reading The Day Christ Died by Jim Bishop. Perhaps a post on that in the days to come. And my aunt generously bought me a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, a book long on my radar screens but never purchased nor read, and I'm about two-thirds done with that. A post definitely on that one as it is, without a doubt, the second funniest book I have ever read. My current set-up, reading two books at once, seems to work for me and keep me from too much hopping, and I'll continue it, having two more fresh books on deck.

Much heartfelt thanks go out to so many people, so many good people, who visited me and cheered me up over the past couple of weeks. It's unfortunate that a tragic event often has to happen before one realizes how much one is loved. But it doesn't have to happen that way. Sadly, it did for me. I probably experienced more "growth" in the past dreadful month-and-a-half than the previous fifteen years. For that, I am grateful. And I am grateful for those who, unnamed here but you know who you are, who cared for me in so many ways during this trial.

More, much more, later.