The biggest thank you

There is no doubt in my mind that I owe many people a debt of gratitude for putting up with me over the past several years, and especially over the past several weeks.

Without the prayers and thoughts and visits of my family and friends, both near and far, I believe things could have turned out quite differently, and I thank every one of you for your support even when I was not so easily supportable.

But among all of you, no one deserves a bigger thank you than my beautiful wife, Keba. No one else has endured what she has had to endure, and she has done so with a kind of grace and tenacity I can only hope to emulate.

Keba, you have been my constant companion and have loved me when I have not been so easy to love. Without you, I believe I would have let myself go even worse, but for some reason, even when I was at my lowest, you have never stopped believing in me.

Thank you for being here, Keba. Thank you for putting up with me. I love you, and I pray I will not let you down again.

DLH

So, what’s this all about?

It’s sometimes hard to know where to begin an explanation of something that has been coming my whole adult life, so I will start with the event that triggered the birth of this blog.

A couple of weeks ago, I ended up in the hospital for almost a week as the result of acute pancreatitis brought on by a dangerous elevation of my blood-borne triglycerides. The condition was serious enough the doctors opted to reduce my triglyceride levels by removing them using a process called plasmapheresis. The whole experience was the most intense and painful thing I have ever experienced in my entire life, and I realized that I am willing to do extreme things to never have to experience it again.

That brings me to the reality of how I ended up in that state. The circumstances that lead to my hospitalization were not just the result of some unexplained biological malfunction, although there is also that element to the story. Instead, a large part of how I ended up in that state began decades ago when I, for a variety of reasons I suppose I may get into over the life of this blog, chose to stop taking care of my body.

In fact, over the past decade, I had pretty much given up on taking care of myself at all, most often with the excuse I had more important things to do. I didn’t. Instead, that excuse was worse than an excuse: it was a lie.

This blog will be my documentation of the refutation of that lie. Over the course of the next weeks and months and, perhaps, even years, I plan to document my journey away from the lie of not taking care of myself toward the truth of taking care of myself so I can do all the things I do better. I want to share this journey with anyone who cares to follow along for the accountability of it, for mutual encouragement, and to provide a place to document the things I discover along the way.

As to the name of the blog, once upon a time, I considered myself to be a rambler, or as the Irish call it, a rover. I tend to wander without being lost, and have long believed that the journey is more important than the destination. I suspect my journey back to health will follow the same meandering but purposeful path so many other parts of my life have.

So, this is all about finding my way back to a place I should have never left: healthy and productive. I invite you to join me on that road.

DLH