Tag: blood transfusions

I was laid off again yesterday

And today, as they say, is the first day of the rest of my life, again.

Most recently, I was unemployed roughly from June 2009 through February 2010. That was a difficult time to be unemployed. The economy was a wreck, and would remain so for a couple more years. (Some will say it’s not much better, and that’s true).

I’m up early for the day – it’s about 1:50 am as I write. I hardly know where to begin. I’m thinking “Dun & Bradstreet” lists; I’m thinking “Eloqua” – I’m tagging this post “Eloqua” because I consider that to be the primary job skill I’ve picked up in the last few years. My hope is that it’s not an insignificant one.

Eloqua is “database marketing” and “marketing automation” rolled into one. I’m a member at http://www.ritesite.com – which I haven’t used for a while. I’ve been told “LinkedIn” is now a fabulous resource. I’m going to check it out. My hope is to morph this site into a job search site. Whatever that means.

For those of you who have come here, looking for news about my wife and her struggle with CMML leukemia, I guess you could say “no news is good news”. There is no sign of the recurrence of the disease. There are some annoying things going on.

For a while I had a series called “Vampire Bride”. She was getting blood transfusions on a fairly regular basis. As it turns out, with blood transfusions, iron accumulates in your body, and it can be damaging over time. So now they are “bleeding” her – taking a pint of blood out each week, (and I think they need to do this eight times), because the iron levels in her blood are too high. (What about “Geritol”?)

Plus, her immune system is brand new. So she has NO immunities built up. And so, she has managed to catch virtually every cold and bug that has come down the pike this winter.

Very high on my list of concerns will be to provide health care coverage for her. She’s a veteran, and she’s in the VA system, but moving to the VA system would force her to lose her current medical team – Dr Rossetti, Dr Jalil, and their whole group at West Penn Hospital. They saved her life, literally, and Beth is still in need of this ongoing type of treatment. They are familiar with her case. My hope would be to see it through.

On my end, it’s a whole different world. Eloqua is a whole new “job skill”. “Marketing automation” is a whole new world. The world of “social media” is completely new, since the last time I looked for a job.

For now, “job-one” is to craft a quasi-kind of plan, which can go out the door once the bullets start flying.

Weekend news

We took a drive out to Hollidaysburg on Sunday to visit with my cousin Debbie. The weather and the views and the trees were just magnificent, and Debbie’s cooking was wonderful as well. (Her husband Walt recently passed away; the plan was that we would buy her dinner, but she, being the “home team”, had the advantage, and she cooked us a magnificent dinner of ham and lasagna and a zucchini casserole.

We also had a chance to talk with Bill Zlatos again, the Tribune Review reporter who wrote the article on Bethany and the “burn pits” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bill is interested in following Bethany’s treatment through her transplant and recovery, and so we’ll hope to have more articles and photos down the line.

Beth had transfusions of two more pints of blood on Friday; she has been having recurring headaches; she slept all day Saturday. Sunday she was feeling pretty well. We just have to take things day by day.

And finally, over the weekend, I worked on (and posted this morning) an article discussing why it seems more than plausible to me that the “pursuit of authority” in the ancient Roman church, caused that church to lose its focus on some very important things.