Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Hello, a blast from the recent past. I have been away for a long while now, attending to health matters, mostly my own. As those of you who read my hubs know, I am bu-polar and go through periods of great activity and times when I can not get out of bed.

Medicine helps, but the illness never goes away.

So for the moment I am up enough to write once more after a long period of roller coastering from deep depression to ecstatic mania. With the addition to my long list of age-induced issues I now add neuropathy, the slow and painful deadening of one's nerve cells. I am diabetic and even though I have been taking pretty good care of my disease for the past ten years or so, it appears now that my diabetes started LONG before I realized I had this problem.

So nerve death is a part of that illness, and it just gets worse. I live each day thankful to wake up and be able to function. I live each day with the love of family and friends. I also live each day with a small army of medicines that I have to take just to be able to go to work and face another day of having to explain to desperate people their unemployment compensation issues.

Things have been particularly tough for people who exhausted their 99 weeks of UI. And there I am facing people weeping, screaming, angry, upset, uncertain of how they are going to exist since they can't find a job.

I won't argue that some people just milk the system, but I have seen real terror on the faces of desperate people when they realize that the good old days of leaving one job and immediately finding another are pretty much dead for now..

So, battling all these demons has left me somewhat depleted, at a negative state for internal get-up-and-go energy. I survive, and that is something in and of itself. Now I can only hope that the mere act of surviving does not take so much energy that I have nothing left to get on and do what I must do.

Thanks to those who have sent me emails and I apologize for having been away for so long. I will attempt to be more active. Oh yeah, I also lost my Internet (Drat & Despair!) and am sending this while I visit my son.

Cheers!

Chef Jeff