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I am 63 years old and have been married for 42 years. We have one son who is 31 and has been married for six years. We do not have any grandchildren yet.
We have two adorable cats, Prissy and Tom. They own and run our household. Of course both cats are spoiled rotten.
My husband is an ex-Marine. He was in the reserves and never saw any active duty. My husband is in management with a major corporation with offices all over the world. He has worked for the same company for 37 years. He would retire but his company determines retirement income based on your age not years with the company. He will be 62 next May and may possibly retire then. I hope so. I would like some time with him before I croak! He and I have a lot of common interests and I would love having him around more.
Following is a rough summary of my work history. For fifteen years I was an executive secretary in the sales and marketing department of two major corporations. Two of those years I was a legal secretary. Meanwhile I was going to school taking various computer courses. Suddenly computers were not intimidating any more, they were actually fun and challenging.
A good friend of mine worked for an independent board of The City of Birmingham. They were not on computer and I was offered the job of getting them set up on computer. I served as systems administrator until 1994. What a great job that was. I loved it! Our board was dissolved and made a part of The City of Birmingham. I continued to work for the City in the capacity as a Operations Data Specialist. I operated as computer systems support for all the field offices of the water works until I retired September 30, 2002.
I retired due to health reasons. I have had back problems since my late teens. I had surgical disk repair in 1994 and again in 1998. While recovering from the back surgery in 1998 I was diagnosed with diabetes. A few months after that they discovered that I had asthma and the early stages of emphysema. Then in April of 2000 they discovered that I had suffered a heart attack. They did an arteriogram the next morning and found that I had four serious blockages. The next day they did four bypasses on my heart.
In January of 2002 I fell at work and broke my shoulder. I returned a month later and on my first day back I fell again and hurt my left knee. Well, after all that I decided it was time to go home so I retired in September of that year. I had worked forty years so I deserved a rest!
Retirement was wonderful. I was doing all sorts of things that I've always loved but never had the time to do. I grew a fantastic container vegetable and herb garden on our patio. We had a huge patio! Oh, that was so much fun. I produced some awesome veggies.
In early 2003 we decided to move after having lived in the home we built in 1971. Who would have believed that you could collect that much stuff in 32 years!!! We moved into our new home in July of 2003 and in the process I re-injured my back by too much heavy lifting. This time it was not a quick disk repair, they wanted to put some sort of rod in my back and I was just not ready for that.
We spent the next months getting our old house ready to put on the market and getting settled into the new home. Then on June 5 of 2003 more trouble. My husband was in the attic checking on two new thermostatically controlled exhaust fans we had just had installed. He was moving some insulation around with his foot when he slipped and fell through the ceiling. He fell near the top of the stairway that comes from the second floor to the first. His left foot apparently hit the step first, taking the full force of the fall, and split open breaking all the bones, severing one artery and his Achilles tendon. His talus bone was completely out of his foot and laying in the foyer. There was nothing holding his foot on his body except skin. He was in emergency surgery for five hours. Somehow they got it all put back together. He now has about an eight inch plate up the side of his leg and two four inch steel pins over his arch holding everything in place. He was on his back with the foot elevated for the next 3-1/2 months.
At this point I had another heart attack - probably from stress. After the heart attack I broke out in shingles on the left side of my head. Shingles are absolutely caused by stress. I never had any of those ugly sores on my face, my shingles did what they called going in. For the next five or six weeks I had violent pains strike me in the head; as many as 26 attacks in one day at the peak. No pain killers helped the pain. The pains would strike, last two to five minutes and then subside. It felt like I had been hit in the head with an axe! One day those horrible pains suddenly stopped but my face and head still hurt. They say that this nerve pain may never go away! When the pain stays with you longer than a month or six weeks it is called post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN). I still have a lot of nerve pain which stretches from my hair line to my upper lip. I take 450 mg./day of a drug called Lyrica which takes away a lot of the pain.
All through this ordeal I kept getting weaker and weaker. I could not walk from our bedroom to the kitchen without stopping in the den to rest. Then I started having trouble breathing. I was making an awful wheezing/gasping sound. It was so bad the first Wednesday in December that I was carried to the emergency room because I couldn't breathe. Nothing they did helped my breathing. After an hour or so the results of my blood tests came back and they discovered that my blood was so low that I didn't have enough blood to power my lungs. They transfused me with two pints of blood and by the next morning I felt like a new person. The source of the trouble was discovered the next morning. I had a huge bleeding ulcer. They took me off Plavix and aspirin and started me on Protonix for my stomach. During all this I lost a lot of my hair and most of it has never come back.
I am sorry this is so long. I know you are bored to death by now. We are nearing the end.
During the three months I was so sick and was hardly using my back muscles, all the muscles in my back lost nearly all their strength. What I am left with now is that I cannot stand for more than ten minutes, if that long. I can walk between fifty to one hundred feet and then I have to find a place to sit down or I will drop to the floor. If my husband needs me to be with him while shopping he has to carry my wheelchair because I can't stay on my feet that long. Bummer!!!
My diabetes has gotten much worse during all this and I am now totally insulin-dependent and my sugar is still not under control. To make matters worse, the first of last year my doctor put me on two different diabetes drugs and the end result was that it did help my sugar BUT in the course of about five or six weeks the drugs put 60 pounds on me. Unbelievable isn't it. He finally took me off the drugs but I am still left with forty of those pounds and they just won't go away. All this extra weight is playing havoc with my sugar. Plus, none of my clothes fit any more.
Now I am having a problem with my feet and legs swelling. Most of that is confined to the left side. Sitting at the computer really aggravates the problem and I am not on here as much as I would like to be.
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