Taking a Break... To Heal.

To my friends and Crusader readers...

For personal (medical) reasons, I will be taking a break from posting on the blog. Perhaps a week or two, but if it extends past that, I will surely let you all know by March 31st. I have included the reason behind the decision below, so if you are interested, you can find out more, or just move on after reading this. I hope that you will return when this is over.

Some of you are aware that I have been experiencing some serious health issues during the past few years. After a relatively not very eventful life of few health related problems, the past three years has pretty much changed that "lucky" streak I've had throughout my life.

In August, 2011 I began experiencing symptoms of an ulcer in my upper stomach. This was due to the medication I was taking for my bad knees, and was basically what kept me functioning at work. The condition unfortunately caused a quick and drastic weight loss of 20 pounds in roughly two weeks, basically because I could not eat more than say half of a sandwich at best without feeling "full." Naturally, that is a symptom of cancer, and immediately the doctors want to run a camera down my throat to see what was up. I suggested that perhaps we give the medication a chance to work before filming commercials in my stomach. The ulcer abated after about a month and a half, which is great and was also unexpected. Just as the ulcer was resolved, BAM!

During the last few days of September, 2011, I began to notice that a pain in my left leg refused to go away. Not only that, one leg had swollen to almost two times the size of the other leg. Making a long story short, I was hospitalized.with a confirmed blood clot in my leg for four days. I have not been to my "day job" since then, and have been trying to be consistent with posting on this blog. I was told that I could not work for three months.

My "day job" is very physically demanding, so not being at work has caused my weight to naturally increase, and after the rapid weight loss, then rapid weight gain, I have come down with Diabetes which at this point is resistant to being controlled by medication. My blood sugar numbers are two to three and a half times higher than "normal" so we are trying to get that under control.

I am making efforts to do what I can to bring the weight down and walk around the block, do some stationary bike riding, etc... but basically I feel tired all the time. You would figure that by NOT working, I wouldn't be tired, but I find that I am more tired than if I had worked.

Anyway, with the new round of meds, and possibly looking at injections if these don't work, it is taking a toll on me, and I was really surprised that it has been a week since my last blog post. In my mind it was two days, so I really think I need a small break from this to concentrate of getting better.

I will try to post if something important comes up, but my friends I really hope to just rest and try to get better so I have decided that concentrating on the new meds is the priority. I won't be posting if I die, right, so I really need to focus on preventing that meeting with the Grim Reaper.

I hope that you will understand what I am undergoing and I would like to thank you all in advance for your prayers and well wishes. I will do my best to get back to this as quickly as I can. Please understand that while blogging may seem simple, and it is, it does add to your stress levels as far as looking for relevant topics, then putting it all together, and hoping that what you say makes sense.

I cannot do things around the house so I will dedicate some additional time to rearranging the photos on my PC which were erased after an accidental hard drive reformat. When you recover the files, they are all renamed numerically, not to mention that you also get multiple copies of the same pics which as you know get scattered on your hard drive as your system fragments. It's one heck of a chore.