Still...

With What I Have Left...

I choose to uplift.

No dogma, don't put that on me.

I love myself. I'm happy with me. As incomplete as things are...

Using what I have left to love someone else seems to be the hardest part. This is what I'll probably die in vain attempting to do.

Oh well...

Fin.

Nothing Left To Say

It has been a painfully uncomfortable weekend. On Friday, I received an injection of the anti-cancer drug Avastin into my left eye. The eye swelled, bled and teared like a leaky water faucet. Just got the eye open Sunday evening, and can now just keep my right eye open.

This was done to work antibodies against proteins running rampant in my eye cavity, causing hemorrhages and weed-like excessive nerve growth which has already happened and is currently blocking my field of vision.

The doctors also assessed the lasering done in past weeks sessions done to stop open bloodflow to the eye and determined that most of the major bleeding has stopped. This led to the decision to quickly get me into surgery today, April 10th to move as swiftly as we can to remove non-functioning matter from the left eyeball and to clear way for the macula and optic nerve to receive light.

There is both a 70% chance the eye can be saved and that my heart can make it through the operation without 'complications'.

Yes, I've come to terms that I can die on the OR table or come out of surgery without a left eye. I am peace with the decision to move forward in this process.

I have hope. That's it. If things get dire, then i'm really not satisfied with how things turned out, but I know the Creator has a master plan.

I have a request: Pray for YOUR OWN understanding. Not the one to complain, but it has been HELL dealing with folks the don't know how to deal with you, or can't do a simple Google search or figure shit out or find the right words to say in their befuddlement. I hate that, so I've mostly dealt with this agonisingly alone.

I'd have things no other way. So, I travel to the hospital and will go thru this the same way I suffered, all by myself.

Be easy, y'all. I really don't have much else to say.

Speak Not, Want Not, But Chronicle It For Prosperity

I stop talking to people. I mean, really I stopped calling and having people call me on the telephone. It just got to a point where I just didn't want to have conversations with people anymore. I don't know what got into me and I kind of feel the same way right now, but let me tell you when you're going through something people can only empathize, sometimes talk isn't enough. It's not that I'm looking for sympathy or even an understanding for that matter, what I'm really looking for someone I could just shoot the shit with. When I started going through the deeper portions of the sight loss before the hemorrhages happened, I just made a decision to stop talking.

I haven't talked to many people since mid to late December. I just don't have the urge to get on the phone and chat anymore. When I drove down to North Carolina from Chicago, everything changed. I'm still here in North Carolina because my vision got so bad I just couldn't see well enough to drive back. And I still haven't talked to many people. Other than logistics, there's really nothing to discuss with folks. Now I'm not some cantankerous old man who is upset and angry about losing his eyesight, I'm just an average dude who really doesn't need to hear about or discuss anything right now. People seem to have forgotten how to have regular conversation with me, like I'm a pariah or something. Fuck your sympathy! If you're not a surgeon or a specialist, then we really have nothing to discuss.

So I stopped talking on the phone. Stop messaging people. I don't send nor do I receive many text messages. I speak to my god sister in Nashville, my sponsor from Chicago who is driving me up next week, my mother maybe once a week or so, my dad maybe once or twice a month and that's about it.

Now I have shared a text with a couple of my blogger friends and someone special out of Atlanta recently, but to be honest with you it's not a whole lot of chatter going on. I don't plan on poking my head out of my ostrich hole and don't plan to go out to do stuff when I get back to Chicago. I think I'll just keep to myself. Like I said, I'm not angry or anything, I'm just maintaining. I'm just trying to stay with myself by myself and for myself. I think this'll help me recover and from what I hear, it may take up to eight months to a year for me to recover from all of the surgeries that I need to have on my eyes. So I look at things a little bit differently, and I just plan on going at this recovery thing alone, stay in the house and maintain until things get better. I really don't feel the need to be social.

Now I do plan to shoot some video, blog and take pictures to put as much information about the retinal surgery proceedure here on the blog. I think I have to let folks know what people have to go through that have retinal problems. I will do the best I can to try to chronicle as much as I can to my tolerance. It's a little difficult for me right now because I have to make a visual review of what I speak into either my tablet on my desktop computer and sometimes I just don't have the wherewithal to see the small letters and text, so I'll do the best I can.

I'll be at a retinal specialist's office here in North Carolina Monday morning very early. I don't plan on making any videos or anything for that particular visit, but I will take some pictures and I will let you guys know what happened. Until that time, you just try to have a good weekend and I will toughen up and get my ass to the office and see what happens from there.

Lisa Lopes

Just as quickly as I set out to make a blog post the other day, I feel like at this particular point, I've already run out of things to say. I mean, I'm doing well… Well, well enough to be doing this, I feel like I could be doing more. As a matter of fact I want to do more but I just can't to be honest. It feels like its been a long process even though I had a hemorrhage in my left eye on December 28. It feels like it's been a year for that matter, but I maintain.

Yeah, on the last week of last year I had what's considered an 'eye stroke'. I  had a massive hemorrhage - A blood vessel burst in my left eye. Now I have tiny hemorrhages in my right eye and I can halfway see out of my right but most of the vision is gone out of my left. It actually happened when I was sleep. I was preparing to make a drive to North Carolina to spend the new year with special people and special friends. When I woke up, I felt like I had some sort of epiphany or some real deep, meaningful dream that I just couldn't remember. I brushed it off, and got myself to get ready to go.

I drove all the way to North Carolina with a white film type substance over my left eye. I just couldn't shake that filminess. I was able to safely navigate the road, but it bothered me that I couldn't shake this film. Now I do have a pair of Blue Blocker type glasses that I bought a truck stop some years ago that wrap around my current prescription lenses and when I put that on during the daytime,  everything turned out fine. It really didn't hit me that something was wrong to a point where particular points of damage was done until I just couldn't see anything right around the second week of January.

So of course I ended up at an ophthalmologist's office. They did digital imaging, scanned my eyes and went deep inside and took a lot of pictures. What we saw was very very discouraging to me. There is about 75% of my left eye basically soaking in blood. The hemorrhage broke and over the period of a couple weeks the eye pretty much filled up with blood. As far as the right is concerned, basically there are tiny hemorrhages and a little blood there, so they do have to go in to remove blood from the right eye as well. It looks like I'm going to need laser surgery to close up the hemorrhaging bleeding points. I'm not happy about this, but it needs to be done.

It looks like it's going to take a series of surgeries to correct all of my problems in both eyes. The part that really messes me up isn't the fact that it'll take eight months to a year to recover fully from all of these surgeries. It looks like I have to get over the fact that they're going to take instruments and put them into the eyeball itself to vacuum out the bad blood and then insert another smaller instrument with the laser beam thingee to close up the hemorrhage points. That's a lot for man to take to know that they're going to stick instruments his eyeballs. And did I mention that people don't know what to do with themselves around me? I am NOT an invalid. I don't need 'help', but I digress...

I got to do what I got to do.

Oh and I'm headed back to Chicago this weekend to set up shop, get a new place and to be centrally located close to my surgeons, support system and the VA hospital so that should be fun. Another road trip but this time I'm not driving.

ROAD TRIP!!!

I will be filming this... Hell, I can't see much, but I can aim and shoot. Gotta chronicle all of this stuff for future review. Plus, my life is a mess right now, might as well share it with the world.

I Still Am...

Breathing.

Alive with focus.

Motivated to, for and by change.

Open to love.

Here in the flesh.

Affected by degenerative disease.

Fighting said disease.

Winning.

In trouble.

I wish I could state something different, but my fight took a hard left turn and now I fight blindness. There was a physical incident late December that could affect how I live the rest of my life. Yes, I'm in physical trouble, but I'm not worried. I let go way before these problems got worse.

Or maybe this is my 'blessing'?

Eh, who knows. Just know that I'm fine and now that I finally gave in, purchased and learned to use voice recognition software (Flex T9 for Android, Mac Speech Dictate and Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC), I should be here more often. I want to blog about this process, diabetes and retinopathy. I believe it's important.

I refuse to suffer in silence, and if I can provide insight for some and information for others with my condition, or scare the hell out of some folk that just can't seem to do right, then... Let the chronicle begin.

More later. It's damn near 5am and I could be getting some sleep and not disturbing the downstairs neighbor. Speech recognition, remember?

Siblings Are For Suckers

I almost killed my brother yesterday.

I was assisting my brother with making a supply run for his delivery company. He called me over a month ago and asked if I could help him with streamlining and modernizing his business for added profitability. I initially balked at helping him because he uses people and never reciprocates. That and plus we never got along.

We are polar opposites, I went to the military and school to educate myself on dealing with the world, my brother dropped out of high school and started hustling on the street. He became well known for his successes and has a large crew, I was known for my successes and power moves in the blue collar, then the corporate setting and by both main street and mean street standards, we both did exceptionally well.

He owns a delivery company that started out as a hustle about 6 years ago and he needs help to stay relevant and is overwhelmed and needs to expand. My younger siblings won't look in his direction because my older brother is straight gully with his shit. he is the epitome of 'ghetto'. He has ambition and good business sense, but he's absolutely the wrong cat to bring to a corporate setting for meetings and such. So he calls about six weeks ago and tells me that since half the company is mine, he could use me as the corporate face. He knows his limitations and understands that with my acumen used on the suit side, he can stay on the boot side and do his thing as I do mine, both of us enhancing the company profile.

I reluctantly decide to help his ass, and for three days, our travels to client sites, meetings and heavy work on deliveries and supply runs became nothing but shouting matches, disagreements and ended with me putting his ass out of my car on the way to a huge client supply pick up.

We argued over two dollars.

You see, he has a new employee (3 months in) that makes food deliveries for a string of Chinese joints in which he delivers the food timely, collects payment from the customer, gets in his vehicle and just rides off. he never speaks of change or gives change to the end customer. So the owner of the restaurants, Mrs. Kim calls and my brother puts her on speaker. She's irate as hell, shouting and cussing that this individual never gives her customers their proper change and this is a make or break habit he has to break or she's switching services. I immediately explain to my brother after the call that we must enforce a zero tolerance policy and release this man from his contract. He balks. He also made excuses for the driver to Mrs. Kim and then he insulted and irritated the FUCK out of me by calling the driver, apologizing to him for the inconvenience and stated "Aye, you cool, get that money man, I didn't think that lady would trip over two dollars man."

What.the.Fuck?

My brother has balked at every single suggestion made to either improve or enhance his business. He fussed, cussed, questioned my sanity, manhood and education whenever I made any critique or suggestion. He got gully with me, so I got gully with his ass. I let him know what time it was and how i absolutely cannot deal with unscrupulous business practices as the law. I questioned his integrity after he basically said 'fuck the customer, I need to get paid' He also confided in me that he doesn't know what integrity is. This negro done lost his muthafuckin mind!

SIDEBAR: We never got along as kids. We tried to kill each other on various occasions. We had a serious Spy vs Spy, I'm gon' kill your ass thing that went on for years. We never lost touch, but purposely kept out of each other's way since 1992 or 1993.

So I said my piece and we ended out night rescuing the thief of a driver because he couldn't finish his route because he ran out of gas. My brother grabbed money out of his own pocket and used my gas can to get dude about a quarter tank of gas. Never asked for reimbursement. Even fronted on me jokingly to this cat on how I've been gone from Chicago for 14 years and how I don't know the street system. This cat is only 16 months older than me, and other than my travels in the military, vacations, corporate training, me 'dragging' my ex across the country inconveniencing  her by trying to establish a home base and make new opportunities for us to become a family as well as me me trucking across the highways of America, Chicago has always been my home.

This muthafucker...

So this morning on the supply run, he brings the shit back up. So I asked him: "in this moment, can I be replaced?" He said no, but in the same breath, he said  that since thieving driver dude makes him over a thousand bucks a week, he would rather keep him on than to have me around at all because all I've done in the past few days is take from him.

I pulled the car over, unbuckled my seat belt and calmly told him to get the fuck out of my car. He started talking again, so I reiterated my position and asked him to un-ass my vehicle or there was going to be a problem. He stated that he didn't want a problem, got out, and I went on my merry way. I hope to GOD that i never see his ass ever again in my natural life. I could probably tolerate his ass at a funeral or something, but other than that...

I truly hate that dude.

Am I wrong?

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