Zach Foster

7 min read

·

Just now

Mentally I’m still feeling well. Haven’t had any serious mental issue since last June. I’m even to where I haven’t had auditory hallucinations in several months.

My auditory hallucinations were usually of footsteps in the hallway, inaudible voices I couldn’t see, etc. Fortunately, never had any visual hallucinations. And my auditory hallucinations were always worse during times of great stress and anxiety.

I’ve also not suffering paranoia nearly as much. I used to have paranoia issues for many years. I was often paranoid about getting evicted from my apartment. I was paranoid about upsetting my neighbors. I was paranoid that strangers were watching me at all times. I had paranoias about people listening in on my phone conversations and going through my garbage. I even had paranoias about strangers reading my online bank statements.

Since I now live in the burbs with my elderly family, I really have no fear of being evicted now. First time in ages that I’m fearful of being one bad day away from the streets or prison. And my family is arraigning that, after my elderly parents die, the house will become mine.

Social Security Disability allows recipients of disability pension (like me) to own their own home. Yet, at the same time, they won’t allow recipients to have more the 2,000 dollars in bank savings at any given time. $2000 isn’t enough to cover car repairs, buy most new appliances, or even cover property taxes in some places. In short, Social Security Disability rules on assets for recipients are woefully outdated.

Other updates include that, after my parents die, my brother has said he will take over as my Medical Power of Attorney if that is my desire. My brother and I have made amends for the way we were growing up. I guess 23 years of marriage, a career, raising children, and becoming a pillar of the community will change anyone. In my brother’s case, it changed him for the better.

I’m losing weight again. My meals are usually quite simple. Even though I love to cook for myself, my mother usually volunteers to make our meals. I’ve found that if I let others do my cooking, I’m less apt to make massive portions or ask for seconds.

My edema is getting back under control. I’ve been having bad swelling from water retention, mostly in my groin and hips. The swelling was bad enough it made walking difficult. Shortly after I solve the problems of joint pains in my knees and ankles, the edema causes swelling to where I can barely walk. Just another problem to solve.

Been on Lasix for over five weeks to treat the swelling. It definitely works. Doctor has also put me on strict fluid restrictions. Which I would have probably done on my own as it was getting irritating having to go to the bathroom many times a day just from peeing off the existing fluid plus what I was putting in on a daily basis.

My blood work is good. I’m not diabetic. My blood pressure is good. My cholesterol and other readings are excellent. Right now, the big goal is to get rid of the edema and restrengthen my heart.

I quit sleeping in the recliner all night. I still nap in it, but my best sleep comes from sleeping in a traditional bed. My back pain is pretty much as solved as it’s going to get. If I can sit on the side of the bed for a few minutes before I have to get up, I have few problems. I have zero problems if I can get to my walker easily and use it to get down the hall to my “office.”

I currently live in a three bedroom, two bath, house in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. I live with my parents, both of whom are in their seventies. I now pay rent as my Social Security Disability Insurance payments have FINALLY settled into something predictable. It feels good to be able to make budgets again.

My financial situation wasn’t the most stable between May 2022 and September 2023. In May 2022, I went to a long-term care facility (at my request). I knew I had far more troubles with my physical health than I could manage on my own, especially since I was also paranoid about getting evicted from my apartment.

The years 2019 to mid 2022 were very stressful for me. And the pandemic made things far worse even though I never caught covid. I treated that time the same way I would have had I gotten sent to war.

Going back to the long term care facility, I had the very long term goal that I was eventually going to get my heart problems straightened out, get my mobility problems treated, and eventually move to Oklahoma City area with the rest of my family. Long story short, my brother came to Oklahoma for engineering school, loved OKC so much he not only never left, but talked the rest of our household to move down here with him, his wife, and their four children.

When I first moved to long term care, I thought it would take at least two years to get my heart and mobility straightened out. I wanted to eventually move to Oklahoma to be with the rest of my family. I remember one of the speakers at my high school graduation back in 1999 saying something like ‘be kind to your relatives. You’ll probably need them more than you can now realize when you get older.

Well, my two years of recovery turned out to need only eight months. It took a couple months to get the heart meds and mobility problems solved. Once the heart was solved, I started physical rehab to rebuild my heart.

I was officially scheduled to do physical therapy three times a week for four months. In addition to my regular therapy, I would go into the therapy room to lift weights and ride recumbent bikes on the weekends. The facility I lived in was a long-term care facility, hospital, physical therapy office, assisted living, all under one roof.

It was also enough of a laid-back place that the nurses didn’t mind me wheeling myself outside to the flower gardens a few times per week as long as I told a nurse where I was going. I even had one of my neighbors in long term care, a 98-year-old retired farmer, who joked that I was ‘faster in a wheelchair than most people on two good feet.’ The staff always celebrated our gains in physical therapy, especially mine.

The food at the facility was good, but the portions were limited. Those limited portions allowed me to lose 90 pounds in those eight months. When I left that facility in February 2023, I was the lightest I had been in ten years. And I was eating homemade staples like turkey and dressing, potato soup, sausages, eggs and bacon, biscuits and gravy, etc. Heck, the staff even allowed me to use their vending machine so I could buy soda pops and Gatorade for myself (as long as I paid for it myself). Few things felt as good as an orange Gatorade after a long physical rehab session.

Obviously, I could have never had this kind of 180-degree recovery without being on Social Security Disability and not wound-up bankrupt. Some may think I abused the system to get healthier, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Abused the system? Well, I certainly got more creative than most people in my position would have been.

I realized that in the process of taking care of my mental health, I wrecked my physical health. Now that I have my mental health taken care of, I just was well going for getting the physical health back. I just couldn’t allow myself to die wondering ‘what if.’ Sure, the odds were against me, but I couldn’t honorably face my death without knowing that I tried even desperate measures to save my physical health. Turns out, my gamble is starting to pay off. I pulled off my master plan, and in less time than I thought it would take. Hell yes, I am proud of myself for pulling this off.

This essay is going to be about how tech advances can allow for art and literature to be inspired, created, and distributed. The seeds for this essay were planted in an article I read a few days ago that stated that NASA has plans to send humans back to the moon on the Artimes 3 mission in 2027.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I heard stories about the space race between the USA and USSR back in the 1950s and 1960s from my elders and popular culture. While I was fortunate to see the space shuttle, the Hubble Telescope, and the International Space Station go up, it just didn’t quicken the pulse and ignite the imagination quite like the idea of putting humans on the Moon. In some ways it felt like we were barely moving ahead for decades.

Even though I didn’t come of age with my parents’ space race, I was privileged to come of age during an era of just as great advances. My best friend and I were the among the first families in our little farming village in Nebraska to get dial up internet. Back then, we were so remote, and internet was so new, it was actually a long-distance phone call (remember that b.s.), to get online.

I remember the dial up, the ‘you got mail’, getting emails from the various girls I met at speech meets all over the state as a speech geek in the late 90s, etc. My best friend tried to talk me into getting a Napster account. She also taught me how to find free porn online without picking up a computer virus. I still remember the old Yahoo chatrooms. I had a few false personalities online, because the whole ‘don’t use your real name online’ kind of thing. I still adhere to the whole ‘don’t feed the trolls’ mantra from back then. Pity that one that didn’t go viral once internet went mainstream.

When I was in college in the early 2000s, I remember hearing about the Human Genome Project. I had just enough of a biology background in my college classes to know that this was a big deal. Several years later, my psych doctor had me take a DNA screen to see what psych meds would work best for me. I’m still on the same psych meds ever since that test and haven’t been to a psych ward since 2013.

Same tech allowed me to take an Ancestry.org test, the one where you spit in a few vials and mailed them off to a lab and your ancestry report came back a few weeks later. Found out I’m mostly German, Irish, and British. Have some Spanish, Swedish, and Russian Jewish mixed in for good measure. So glad I got those results and was able to share them with my Grandma Foster shortly before she died in 2015.

Still remember the old Myspace account from the mid 2000s. Kept up with a few old friends, heard some obscure bands, shared some of my early poetry, and tried my hand at some early online games. Like many people of that era, I migrated over to Facebook around 2008 or so. This was before Facebook became social media for senior citizens. Oh, what am I saying? I’m probably a senior citizen now as far as anyone born after 9/11/01 is concerned.

I have a passion for writing and even that was influenced heavily by the tech advances of my era. Originally, I tried to get my writings published with traditional publishers and university presses. Of the first 100 snail mail submissions I did, I received exactly 3 approvals for publishing. To be sure, these weren’t paying publications. An old writer friend of mine told me that getting 3 approvals in the first 100 submissions was actually better than average. Granted this was 15 years ago.

So, I went with a print on demand service for my early poetry, mental illness essays, and my semi-autobiographical novel. The novel was a coming-of-age story loosely based on my college experiences in the late 90s and early 2000s. In short, it was kind of like Jack Kerouac except fewer drugs and less hitchhiking.

My poetry was mostly nature poetry and everyday working-class people type poetry, almost like a modern Carl Sandberg, Robert Frost, etc. Other poets who inspired me included Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson. I also like some of the Old-World poetry, like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Dante’s Divine Comedy, some of Rudyard Kipling’s work, etc.

As much as I loved writing poetry in my twenties, I found out that poetry doesn’t pay well. But it was good training for essays and articles, especially the idea of catching a reader’s attention quickly and telling a compelling story.

In my late 20s, I attended a poetry writing workshop hosted by my hometown’s state university where one of the lecturers said, to the effect, that poetry was kind of a ‘protest of death.’ Until then I looked at it as a celebration of life and being human. But I guess celebration of life and protest of death could be seen as opposite sides of the same coin.

Fast forward 15 years to the year 2024. I’m still writing at least some every day. Made some money off my writings. Now that I’m on Medium, I actually make a few bucks every month off my writing. I’m glad that sites like Medium exist. I’d love to find more sites like this. Get the whole ‘multiple streams of income’ thing going with my writing, I guess.

I took this stroll down Memory Lane as a means to illustrate how tech, inspiration, hopes of youth, and art meet. Today I am getting paid every month for writing for an audience on Medium. It’s hardly a fortune, but it’s a lot better than what I was getting all those years of living in low-income housing pounding out blog entries, poems, and ideas for stories when I was in my late 20s and early 30s.

I’m currently in the process of finding some of my old writings. I decided I want to get back into every type of writing I used to do 15 to 20 years ago. I did poetry, novels, essays, blogs, wise quips, etc. I imagine some of my wise sayings might even make some halfway decent memes now.

At the end of 2022, while I was still in Genoa for therapy for heart failure, I made a few goals for the year 2023. One of those goals was to get out of long-term care and move to Oklahoma with the rest of my family. That I accomplished.

I decided I wanted to write more. That I am doing. Moved some of my old material to sites where I actually make a few bucks from my writings. Medium is one of those sites.

I had a third goal of organizing some of my older writings and get ready to have some of them published on Amazon or another such service. The editing is all done. Still considering my options.

One goal I didn’t accomplish was finding my own apartment. But then, I rather enjoy living in the suburbs. While I have made a lot of friends in my online writing groups, they still aren’t the same as getting to see someone in person. Overall, for me, 2023 has been a good year. Been the best year of the 2020s so far. I would definitely go for not going through a pandemic or surviving a near death experience again anytime soon.

2023

End Of Year

Review Of Goals

Goal Accomplishment

2024

3

Thoughts on the End of 2023

New Year’s Eve has long been one of my favorite holidays. As a teenager I went to New Year’s Eve dances all the time with my best friend and her two sisters. The next morning I’d usually binge watch football bowl games while enjoying the last of the Christmas break from high school.

In the mid 2000s, after I moved out on my own, I lived in a small college town. I used to go to the local dive bars as most were hosting live music. Most years I made a point to leave shortly before midnight just to beat the after-midnight crowd and drunk drivers. Gave this tradition up in the mid 2010s as it became obvious that most of my friends had moved on, gotten married, etc.

But New Year’s is still a time for reflections and hope for the new year. I don’t read much about those who say New Year’s Resolutions are a waste of time and effort. So what if they are? It’s still fun to reflect on the past twelve months and make predictions for the next twelve months.

The last several years have been rough for most people. Most of us have changed due to world events and personal struggles. I don’t even recognize the person I was ten years ago. If you were to tell me about the changes and hardships that I would encounter in the next ten years back then, I wouldn’t have believed that I would have survived those changes. Most people have no clue what they are capable of surviving.