First of all, I want to thank all of the people who sent me comments following my previous blog. Truthfully, a lot more people were kind enough to respond than I had ever expected.
My second point is more of a health report. I have just come back home from almost two weeks in the hospital and rehab. A lot of people, including me, had noticed that my stories had gotten darker and darker over the last six months, and now I have an explanation. For the last six months or so, I have been suffering from a bladder infection that was steadily worsening until it finally got bad enough to put me in the ER.
I have been suffering from what seemed to me to be a strange combination of symptoms: things like dizziness and depression. I had other problems, too, but those were the most obvious. Anyway, at the hospital, I went through a range of tests that all came up negative, except for the bladder infection.
The consensus was that I had been sick for at least six months with the infection, and it was steadily getting worse. I don't know what the result would have been if I had not been treated when I was, but I am feeling a lot better.
It seems that depression is one of the effects of a bladder infection, and I had a major one. Not only that, my wife had gotten sick enough to require hospitalization, and that only added to the depression. She and I both are now home, and I feel a hell of a lot better!
I expect that my stories will lighten up once I have cleared out the ones that I wrote while I was feeling so bad. The moral of the story is that you should not down-play the seriousness of a bladder infection. Rest assured that I will never again do so.