I think its from the bottom of my heart when I say : Boy its good to be back ! After being offline and almost off-planet the last couple of weeks, popping my head back into the realms of cyberspace feels very good indeed. For those of you who don’t know : A couple of weeks ago I ran into some serious health issues. Using her preferred techniques of shock-and-awe, mother nature decided it was time to “tap me on the shoulder” and remind me that I was NOT invincible and my application to join the Avengers was not filed under ‘realistic’. Time for a Kernel Panic !
I say it lightly , but it was pretty serious. In all fairness both myself and my family got a big scare as we were reminded what a delicate an precious thing our “health” is. One moment I was having dinner with the lovely Niejana, an hour later I was in hospital hooked up to heart monitors and with doctors wanting to shove me into MRI’s and bombard me with X-rays to find out just what went wrong. I won’t go into details but let just say that I had some acute bad clusters on my harddrive and those did not only endanger my OS but also threatened to corrupt all user data. The probable cause of this : Trying to fit to many hours in a day, never settling down, never taking time to relax .. trying to ramp up the RPM’s on life’s little treadmill and ignoring the “Overdrive” warnings that both my body and the people around me flagged weeks ago.
So for the last couple of weeks I had to (and still have to) take it slow. Have enough rest, don’t try to overreach and in honesty : Stop and smell the roses sometimes. Its been a scary couple of weeks but things are looking up. After three weeks i’m back to work and tentatively (and with moderation) pick up my hobbies and my online life. I have encountered my limitations and got a peek at how precious (and fleeting) life can be. I hope it changed me for the better.
The people responsible for you being able to read this post are of course the doctors and nurses at both the Vesalius hospital in Tongeren and the UZ Gasthuisberg in Leuven who took excellent medical care of me..
But most of the praise goes towards my beloved wife Niejana. She saw something was wrong, got me to hospital and along with her family took care of me these last couple of weeks. She makes sure that I don’t fall back into the rush and kinda protects me from the ADD-overdrive-Gnome that lives inside me. She had red-flagged my lifestyle weeks before the event and the last couple of weeks have been very stressful for her. But thanks to her love and devotion, I can still roam cyberspace, instead of roaming the big beyond.
I also want to thank you guys and girls for the countless emails, posts, comments and postcards wishing me a speedy recovery. Both Niejana and myself were touched by your kind thoughts and it was a big motivator in getting well. So as we turn a dark page and begin an empty slate …. Lets get this show back on the road.