In February and March of last year, I found myself having less and less energy, already with some problems of heart disease and sleep disorders. A couple of times, I variously have fallen asleep in my desk chair, slid out, and injured myself mildly. At first, I didn't get much response from the emergency physician although my primary physician was worried, as was I -- I'm a medical scientist. After a couple of days, I developed a urinary infection that taught me the meaning of 10/10 pain. The next ER doc, however, was skilled and humane. He looked me in the eye and said, "I don't know what's wrong with you, but you're really sick. You need to be here and let us fix it." I went up to a room for management of my urinary infection, but a little while later, several nurses RAN in and rolled me to intensive care, having found several life-threatening cardiac abormalities. By then, I hurt so much that the possibility of dying wasn't all that upsetting.
Given where I'm writing, I can share that the consulting urologist came up with some specialized suppositories that did relieve the pain. To my amazement, it varied with the individual nurse's technique, but the insertion was, to put it mildly, pleasant.
They got me stabilized enough to replace my aortic valve through the aorta -- I would not have survived open-heart. Things started getting a good deal better, and by July, treatment was to get more aggressive. Implantation of a biventricular pacemaker-ICD, which treats heart failure by synchronizing the pumping chambers, failed in July but succeeded in September. That's given me a good deal more energy, although I had a couple more hospitalizations probably related to sleep disorders, and also to insulin not being affordable until insurance changed. I've been waiting months for a sleep specialist, but will see one in a different practice in a few weeks. I'm optimistic.
Anyway, I've started up with both fiction and enterpeneurial projects. Earlier, I was a research assistant on a biography of GEN Jim Mattis, outgoing US Secretary of Defense. I'm starting a new universe that has just a little do-over, but, in particular, with psychiatric treatment models that also treat hypersexuality of various forms most positively.
I'm also thinking of restarting my time-travel about the JFK Administration and historical variants on Vietnam. I've written history about those war games, and also was an intelligence analyst, so the details and variants will be well developed. Yeah, I'm doing it over from a time when I was in high school, but with just enough extra abilities to affect politicians.
Might reexamine getting re-involved in the Swarm Cycle -- if you get away from some of the FTL and AI, I think some current US "information warfare" is superior to the Swarm. It's an interesting balance issue to produce fiction without kicking their asses.
An extended family member and housemate knows less than he thinks about computer hardware. I'm a software engineer and hardware/networking architect, but never suggested I was good at building PCs. My desktop is down and I desperately need to get it back to being big and fast. I do a lot of multitasking when I write.