Return to service announcement

Hello blog readers! I've been absent for quite a while, and I'm sure y'all have noticed how very behind I am in writing my reviews. I'd like to explain my absence and my seeming negligence. Well, real negligence, just not deliberate or malicious towards the authors and publishers I've promised reviews to.

Many of you know that I suffered a nervous collapse in 2014. For the first time in my then-55 years, the cumulative effect of childhood woes coupled with several years of psychological warfare waged against me by some people I lived with coupled with an unexpected betrayal led me to get very close to suicide.

A chance phone call from a mental health worker named Julie prevented me from going through with the plan. She talked me down off the emotional ledge. I even put away the knife I had planned to use to sever my jugular vein because she jauntily assured me it was unnecessary, help would be there soon.

It was.

I spent 4-1/2 months in the locked psych ward at Nassau University Medical Center. The psychiatrists and social workers figured out the biochemical problem underlying my extreme and disproportionate emotional response to my situation. They *could* have discharged me after 6 weeks, I was stable emotionally, but I had no place to go. The social workers finally found this assisted living facility willing to accept me despite my suicide attempt and here I am today.

Regrettably I am still physically disabled by 36 years of cumulative effects from a severe case of tophaceous gout. The pain of the ginormous deposits of uric acid and calcium crystals on my joints and along my tendons is pretty damned awful. I find sitting for any length of time excruciating. I stand up and lie down well...it's the transitions that slay me. In today's opioid-fearing climate I am undermedicated by the pain management doctor because he's afraid he'll be investigated for giving out such a large prescription. Medicare doesn't pay for cannabinoids, which would do a better job at lower doses and I can't come close to paying the $350 a month the prescriptions cost.

So sometimes the hopelessness of a chronic and incurable condition plus the deep uncertainty that faces every person on Medicare as to whether our care will continue to be funded plus the absurdly deep cuts in Medicaid that pay for the facility I live in...well...in April I cratered. I couldn't read, let alone write reviews. I am still wobbly in the following-complex-arguments area. Getting a lot better! Adjustments to the thyroid medication made a **HUGE** difference, and upping my use of the facility's on-call psychologist has made things that much more manageable.

So to all of y'all miffed all the way up to ticked that I haven't reviewed your book(s): I most humbly apologize, and promise that I will make good on those reviews this year. I will be back on Twitter, I'm going to learn Instagram use now that I have a smartphone (thanks, Stephanie! *smooch*), and am generally announcing that #ReadingIsResistance is back up and running at 1/4 speed.

Feel free to contact me in all the ways you have if there is something you'd like to know or like for me to know. Remember that responding here on the blog requires that you be a member of the blog, an easy thing to accomplish provided you have a Google account. I hate spam so I never blast BS to my blog followers, just the posts I write.

And to the around 500 daily readers I garner from all my publicity-hounding, I love each and every one of y'all. I am so grateful that my ideas and opinions are that interesting to that many folks.