January 2018
At work, I did what I could.
But, as the weeks and months passed by, what I could do was less and less all the time. As my wife researched the matter, she found a paper by the National Institute of Health in the US that pointed out this was common with post-encephalitis patients. They get through the actual encephalitis and then return to work, thinking they’ll be okay. Unfortunately, they often get worse rather than better.
I finally had to take a short-term sick leave from work (January 2018). I figured if I took a couple months off, it might be exactly what I needed. About two months into my sick leave, I noticed that regardless of how much rest I got, my symptoms continued to grow worse.
I had also taken part in a therapy designed for people with brain trauma. A lot of the people they worked with found significant improvement in their lives through the techniques they used. Sadly, I’m often the oddball. The therapy did little to help me, other than exhaust me. I began to long for the day when it ended, as each therapy session took more and more out of me.
In coordination with my physician, we decided I couldn’t go back to work. This was a struggle for me, in a way. In terms of the exhaustion, it was a relief. But in terms of my own dreams and desires… I was stepping down from the career that I had loved… the career I’d felt was more of a calling than anything else!
I have often said, however, that amidst so much loss, I felt God had given me a gift in this passion for writing. I continued to write as much as I could handle, finishing the third book in the Arestana Series, which I’d written for my sons, and the first of the Jerry the Squirrel books.
This writing also opened up some great opportunities to meet some of you and develop some great friendships with other authors and so many people. I thought I mentioning some of you specifically here, but then I realized how many I would miss on the list… I don’t want to do that.
So for me, I continued to write children’s books and then on to some adult books, doing all I could to figure out how to get back to health at the same time as enjoy writing which had turned into my therapy, in a manner of speaking.
That January ended up being a major turning point in my life. The point where I stepped down from my job to seek recovery, only to find I could never return to work.
But, during difficulty, often we find good things as well!
To be continued…
