A Thank-You

I've focused quite a bit here about the problems I've been having and not enough on the good things. While I'll still put in the bad...this is supposed to be a record of the bad as well...I realize I need to focus a little more on the positive aspects of the operation.

I'll start out with this post where I thank a couple people. Lee is a follower of the blog who started emailing me. He has difficulties in his life adapting to some of the post-op lifestyle changes, but he sent me a number of emails where he focused on getting me to look at the positives. He is many more months into this life change than I am, so he has some perspective on what he's talking about.

Second was an email from an online acquaintance I hadn't emailed in a month. He is a frequenter on a mail list for Ubuntu-users help; knowledgeable and ever helpful, he's one of the common names on the list for people seeing assistance. I had stopped following activity on the mailing list after my surgery. It's a place of much drama, I had enough drama in my own life to deal with, and more important I was getting short tempered and easily frustrated and having to slog through a hundred or more messages a day with the same issues over an over again with the same answers and same requests not to top post or not hijack topics was starting to get to me.

So like I said...I stopped following.

Imagine my surprise when I was gone nearly a month and then I found an email from NoOp, one of the closest things the list has to a wizard on the list, waiting for me. He was asking how my surgery had gone because he hadn't heard anything lately. I was shocked. To be honest I didn't think anyone on the list would notice or care that I had disappeared.

Between Lee and NoOp I was put into an emotional place where I needed to reevaluate my situation and see that yes, I have problems, but I also have been making progress. I can move more easily. The quarter-sized hole in my gut is closer to a nickel-sized hole now. I managed to stick to roughly forty to sixty ounces of milk and three 4 ounce pureed servings of food per day. I can get up more easily and slowly, very slowly, I'm increasing my ability to move and adapt to my healing and sore muscles. I can get through most of a day of work without falling asleep at the keyboard or curling over in pain or suffering outbursts of pure honesty of what is on my mind when I find yet another person making one and a half to two times my income is not able to follow simple directions nor use complicated adjectives to describe what is actually happening to their computer.

So thank you Lee and thank you NoOp. I don't know if you guys will see this note or not, but thank you for your help in seeing that my life is more than a faux bullet wound in the tummy and that there is progress being made in my healing process.