Do I stay or Do I go??? Help me decide Steemit!
I have been a member of Steemit for roughly 6 weeks as of the time of this posting. During that time I have:
- Fallen in love (With Steemit)
- Learned about Cryptocurrency
- Acquired (and spent) my first Bitcoin (several actually)
- Bought and sold numerous other Crypto-Coins (usually at a loss cause I'm a noob and impatient)
- Had multiple posts on Steemit that did really well
- Lost my cool several times (including a major flip-out today in Steemit Chat)
- Issued TWO (2) Apology Posts
- Created a total of 6 accounts (three for mining and three for posting different types of material - see below for all my accounts and what they are for)
- Threatened to sell my account(s) multiple times
- Been up-voted by whales and flagged by just about everyone at one point or another
- Started writing again (true stories and fiction) for the first time in 30+ years
- Realized just how bad my life sucked - when I wrote My Life Story - Surviving Against the Greatest of Odds
- Realized I FRACKING HATE TRUCK DRIVING with a passion
All of which has led me to creating this blog entry here on Steemit. You see I am at a very difficult point in my life that is going to require a fair amount of explaining so please bare with me.
First, a little about me that wasn't in My Life Story.
When I was 18 years old I exploded the last two vertebrae in my lower back. The ones that fuse my spine to my hips. I was told I would never walk again as it nearly severed my spinal cord (sciatic nerve) in two different places. ** This was in my Life Story**
For three months I couldn't move anything below my arms, even my pecker was on an extended vacation and pretended he was an "injured soldier laying on two duffel bags".
But before that when I was only 14 I was walking out of Typing Class (Freshman in High school) and some punk hit me in the back of the head with a weight off of a compound bow. Although the doctors didn't detect it at the time it had exploded the very first vertebrae in my spine almost severing my brain stem where it attaches to the sciatic nerve. It would be almost 20 years later before the damage would be discovered.
As a result of that first injury that went completely un-diagnosed I did a lot of things I would not have done otherwise. Like breaking/training/competing horses up into my 20's whenever I had the chance (not very often though). Twice after that I came off the back of a horse to meet its hoof on the way down. Both times I was wearing Bicycle Helmets and both times they exploded into millions of tiny little pieces (okay okay maybe it was on a few dozen pieces).
Neither of those times did I go to a hospital, however after I fell asleep the night of those injuries and the one when I was a freshman, I awoke the next day with near complete amnesia. It was fleeting and only lasted a few hours. However, I never recovered the memory of the 3 days that I had gotten injured. Additionally, I found out years later that between those three injuries my spine in my neck and back and been utterly destroyed.
As a result of the four (4) injuries listed above, and a lifetime of acting like I wasn't ever injured I now have a total of 7 missing/deteriorating vertebrae in my spine (2 in my neck and 5 in my back). Partially because of the injuries and partially because of developing Degenerative Osteo-Arthritis (most likely due to the injuries). Additionally, I have 5 bulging or herniated discs (also known as Degenerative Disc Disease).
As a result of my all this, my sciatic nerve is quite literally being pinched in 13 different places, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. When people ask me "on a scale of 1-10 what is your current pain level" I fracking laugh. Then respond "I live with a 12 on a good day". If I am somewhere (doctor or hospital) where they ask me that question I am up to around a 20 (on that same 1-10 scale).
As if all this wasn't bad enough I had a dump truck pull out in front of my car in 2006 and then stop. I went under the Dump Bucket and hit the rear end (drive axle) of the dump truck at 45 mph. Never even had time to hit my brakes. The impact was so brutal that the front and rear of my car folded up (I wasn't hit from the rear) and both front and rear seats broke loose as did the seat-belt I was wearing. My chest hit the steering wheel so hard that my hands (still attached) went through the firewall (passed through the dashboard and the metal that separates the inside of the car from the engine compartment) before my head went through the windshield (windscreen for you damn Brits) into the bottom of the dump truck.
Miraculously I walked away with, what I thought at the time, was only a cracked (fractured) cheekbone (in two places on the right side of my face) and a busted bottom lip. Sure there were a few cuts and scrapes but no major trauma, or so I thought. I was standing and talking when the ambulance arrived and I sat up (seat-belted in) for the trip to the hospital where I was promptly released about 2 hours later when my father showed up to get me. Because my cheek bone had been fractured in two places there was extensive swelling that hid any signs of additional trauma, for about a month. When the swelling went down I immediately noticed the right side of my face was dead, no nerve sensations and virtually no movement. It just sagged (95% of the time) as if I had recently had a major stroke. Who knows maybe I did and no one ever figured it out.
But I went back to work, I was doing Field Service Repair at the time but soon returned to truck driving. It would be a few years before I put everything together, but that accident in 2006 caused extensive neurological damage and not just to my face. I have since gotten most of the sensation and motion back in my face, but when I am tired you can still tell it isn't right. Which is one of the reasons I rarely shave, the beard hides it quite nicely and doesn't lead to people thinking I am damaged or retarded....they get their other ways though.
In 2010, I was in my semi, with my then wife and we were shut down by State Patrol on the side of Interstate 84 near Pendleton, Oregon. It was winter time (a few days before American Thanksgiving Day) and we where heading home to Salt Lake City, UT. The police had stopped us to demand we put snow chains on the tires of the tractor and trailer. Well I had never chained before but decided to try rather than sit there. About 1/3 of the way through this grueling and agonizing problem I had, what felt like, a heart attack. I climbed back in the truck and sat there for about 20 minutes, focusing on slowing my breathing and heart rate until I felt a little better, then got out and took the chains off and put them away. As I was preparing to get back in the truck the cop came up and asked "where do you think you are going with no chains' I replied "They lifted the chain requirement and I am having a heart attack so probably to the closest F'ING HOSPITAL" then I climbed in the truck and took off.
By the time I made it down the mountain to the next town I felt considerably better so I drove on to Salt Lake City, UT. Once we were unloaded we hoped in our car and went up the mountain to Park City, UT (home of the Sundance Film Festival and the best skiing in the United States) to a friends house for Thanksgiving. Three days after what I thought was a heart attack my chest was still killing me so I went to the local clinic and they immediately called me an ambulance. My pulse was abnormally high and my heart beat was erratic. By the time I arrived at the hospital the drugs (the clinic gave me) had kicked in and the doctors there told me it was likely Angina or Gas and discharged me.
I have since had 3 more heart attacks, the second one occurred in Boston Massachusetts in 2012 and I was rushed to Boston General, one of if not the best, Heart Hospitals on the planet. They took me into their new 4d CT-Scan machine and showed me on an HD 60" television my heart beating in real time, they could even rotate the image in real time as well as zoom in and actually look inside my heart in real time. Turns out I was having heart attacks but they were not caused by any kind of blockage or collapsed arteries. They were neurological in nature. Thankfully, I have a naturally enlarged heart (since birth) that is almost twice the size of a normal human heart. Thanks to that, when my heart really gets to beating it doesn't have enough room between my lungs, spine and rib cage to beat far enough out to tear itself apart and do any permanent damage.
However, each one hurts worse and for a longer period of time than the previous one. It wouldn't be for another two years that I discovered that I suffer from Neuropathy and most likely Multiple-Sclerosis (unconfirmed as there is no test for MS only a process of elimination which I can't afford 50 visits to specialty doctors to get a confirmation of).
So on top of extensive damage to my spine, my sciatic nerve being pinched in 13 places at all times, 4 heart attacks, Degenerative Disc Disease, Osteo-Arthritis, Neuropathy and probably Multiple-Sclerosis I also experience near constant sleeplessness; frequent (sometimes for days or weeks at a time) feeling of parts of my body being asleep (imagine sitting on the toilet (loo for you brits) for too long and your legs going to sleep. I feel that in various parts of my body for weeks at a time. In fact as of right now my left arm, from the elbow down, has been asleep for over 3 weeks. My feet are always tingling like they are asleep if I am sitting down. When ever I lay down, almost every time, my left leg feels like it is asleep.
To top all of this off, I can not sleep. The pain, uncomfortable feeling and tingling sensations are FRACKING UNBEARABLE. Add to that I have one of the worst jobs on the planet, especially for someone with a bad back and my life SUCKS.
It is a small miracle (actually a major miracle) that I haven't completely lost grip with reality or worse gone bat shit crazy like my mother was. Then when you throw in "My Life Story" and all the crazy, FRACKED up crap that I was subjected to as a child and even as an adult and even I have to wonder:
HOW HAVE I NOT BECOME A SERIAL KILLING PSYCHOPATH
To show you how little sleep I get take a look below at my Sleep Chart!
Sleep Schedule for last 30 days
As you can see from the chart above I only average about 3 hours a day of sleep. If you look closely you will see a total of 10 days this month with 0 sleep. Trust me when I tell you MY SLEEP TRACKER WAS ON AND WORKING. There is a gap of 5 days with ZERO SLEEP and another with 3 days of ZERO SLEEP.
Now I would love to say this is because I was working too much to sleep, but sadly that is not the case. In fact, in the month shown above I have only worked (driven this semi truck) a total of about 8 days and made less than $1,000 USD. To those of you on the African Continent, in South America or in the Middle East over to Asia I know that may seem like a lot of money but trust me IT ISN'T. In fact it is so far below poverty level in the USA that there isn't even a word for how FRACKING broke I am in the English Language.
Now that all that is out of the way, time for the real reason I wrote this post.
I haven't been home in 2 months, in fact the $1,000 USD above is actually my entire income (from truck driving) in that 2 months I have been away from home. That is $500 a month income, $125 a week. Which barely even covers my cigarettes. Average of $6 a pack, 2.5 packs a day = $15 a day or $90 a week. If it were not for discovering Steemit 6 weeks ago I am not sure I would even be alive today, or if I was I would most likely be in jail. You see 2 months ago I got a job offer (my current job) and I felt sorry for the old guy. He owned 2 semi trucks and neither of them had been moved in months. He had a string of 5 bad drivers in a row that had destroyed his trucks and just about bankrupted him. So I agreed to come to work for him and help him dig out of the hole. However, over the two months since he has just gotten farther and farther in the hole.
Most of that because of the company he has his semi trucks (and me and him) leased on to. Next week, I will finally be going within 100 miles of my house and have told him I was taking a few days off.
The problem is, I want to quit. He wants to move the trucks to a different company and wants me to keep driving for him. This is my dilemma as I really do feel for him and want to help him, but at the same time I am at the end of my rope. I am so far past the breaking point, the point of no return; that place where nothing matters and anything becomes possible and most likely sounds like a good idea.
I can't sleep, everything I eat or drink passes straight through....likely literally within 30 minutes to an hour it is coming out the lower end whether I am ready for it or not in some cases. Yes my nerves are shot so badly that I don't even realize I have to go until sometimes it is too late. Now part of that is if I am driving there are very very very limited places I can stop to go and part of it is I am just too stressed to know what my own body is doing.
This is very scary to me and leads me to my question, which I hinted at in the title and the choice of video to include at the start of this blog entry.
Do I stay, or Do I go???
Should I keep working for this guy and hope he gets us moved to this other company and things get better, or should I quit next week when I get home and tell him "sorry dude, but I can't do it anymore!"
If the answer is "Quit" then what? I don't make enough from Steemit alone to survive and my health is completely fracked as you read above. So what do I do?
PS - I am an aspiring writer and inventor, but have no real outlet (like Steemit) for my inventions. Meaning I have lots of potentially revolutionary ideas for inventions but can't find anyone to help me become the "Nikolai Tesla of the 21st Century" - If you didn't catch the hint there most of my invention ideas have to do with energy.....or rather clean, renewable energy that doesn't pollute the environment or harm fish, birds and other wildlife....not even humans!
As promised at the top here is the list of my accounts, why I have them and what they are used for!
- @venuspcs - First and main account - used for general posts that do not fit into other categories listed below
- @venuspcs1 - Mining Account only!
- @hornytrucker - Mining Account only!
- @hornytrucker1 - Mining Account only!
- @scifiwriter - Secondary account - used for Actual Stories (will most likely be mostly fiction)
- @the-how-to-guy - Tertiary Account - used exclusively for How-To Guides and Tutorials
begins with a strong history dude, I can say a thousand tips on what to do with your life, but only you have the answer, take your time and think, youare smart guy, and have the tools to discover. good luck
I do like your post and all the posts you publish @venuspcs ! please don't stop typing coz steemit without you would be like steemit without Ned LOL
And we have another UP-VOTER who didn't read my post! - Care to try that again @webdeals?
haahahahha shhhh I did read half of it... then I run to take a beer and popcorn coz was very long to read... I come back after my previous comment and in my funny way I am trying always to play down in this bad situation.
I did read everything and your life is a very bad life all focused on traumas, accidents and health problem. I like chat with you on daily bases... you have to understand something... you said that your body doesn't want work anymore. Did you pay any pension till now??? Because the problem is... if you quit your job... your life should be better but without money coz you should find a way to earn something! Keep trying typing in steemit and something good will come out I am pretty sure!
In case you will not quit your job.. then your body will feel always worse...
Can you sell your truck in the way to live a better life??? Wouldn't be a rich life... but at least you can eat and smoke (you should smoke less) at home and you can be more relaxed and surely you will be able to write some good post!!!
All the best... your friend.
@webdeals
The semi isn't mine and the I don't really have anything of value to sell. I live in an old 1983 Motorhome that is falling apart and nothing works and I drive an old 1987 Chevy pickup that is in almost as bad of shape as the motorhome.
I vote STAY! . You aren't a scammer.
That wasn't the question, now go back and read it SPEEDO-GONZO-LESS
Haha...I was still reading but the bottom part of the post caught my eye :P
Straps on his Speedo. Back to it..
Why are you bringing me into this?
It worked didn't it???? Just kidding I was actually thinking about Gonzo from the Muppets....always doing stuff without thinking!
People usually don't read too long posts. You need a summary.
@abit summary is now at the bottom of the post and I cited you for the idea. Thanks for the suggestion!
I've enjoyed your posts so I hope you stick around, but if the opposite happens I wish you well.
He asked if he should quit his job, not if he should leave steemit!
Someone didn't read the post @naifaz - Wanna try again????
Alright. All I can say is damn you have had a rough life. If I were in your shoes I would probably cut my losses on working for that guy, but with no other source of income it is a tough spot. How are you not on disability? I know that SS doesn't pay to much but your slowly killing yourself isn't helping either. I hope that steemit works out for you. I myself still don't have much pull here and probably won't for a while, but I still wish you well. As for sticking with this guy or quiting that is really up to you. My advise would be stick it out until you have subsidized your income.
As far as SS (Social Security Disability Income - SSDI) it is very very hard to get, usually requires multiple times applying with lawyers who don't work for free, mean time NO INCOME for the 3-5 years it typically takes to get approved....oh and if they find out you are working (earning money from any source) they will never approve you.
It's sad that it takes our wonderful government so long to help out people like you just turn around and punish for trying to keep your head above water while working through the process. I didn't know it took 3 to 5 years for approval. The lawyers are a given though.
Maybe there is a way that you would be able to partner up with this guy, play a part in planning and management of other drivers (if that's a thing.) This might get you out of the truck yourself while still staying with your current employer. (Especially since it seems you like the guy as a person.)
<----actually read the post! :P
DING DING DING and the winner (so far) is @sykochica. Excellent idea, but I have already owned a trucking company (closed the doors last october) and the stress of running one is far far far worse than the stress from working for one.
Ah, understandable. I'll see if I can think of something for ya, that's a tough spot.
You always one up us @sykochica now you got me thinking we should have a quiz at the end of each story submission to see if anyone even read it :P that is the only way they get their 'cut' of the action.
Hehe, I like that idea. Think it might add a little more validity to quality voting. In my opinion :)
I vote you stay.
I got flagged by a whale and lost $1,000.00
I wrote it off cause its the free market and it is what it is.
Steemit is just beginning. You may leave if you wish, but i have a feeling you will return regardless ;-)
And we have a third person that didn't read the post, just voted/commented and moved on. Care to try that again @keithsmih There is a really important question in there I need help answering.
Time is money. I would stay at the trucking job. When you have downtime do what I do. I write down my ideas in notes. Then later bring it together. Sometimes the money doesn't pay here and I know a lot of people looking to make a living here and I would not do that just yet. It's a beta. I would stay here too. Or leave. I read your post but misunderstood it and I apologize.
I also read at 2700 words a min with about 90% comprehension so sometimes I miss things. Thanks for the reply and call out.
It's a shame that you are not making enough here to support yourself, so that you don't have to drive the truck.
You have quite good fan base so you should definitely stay,and more you will stay more you will be recognized as early adopter. If you want an opinion from a devoted friend, stay here and stay active!you'll be the best!
For your job,if you think you make enough on here to stay only here do it,if not....well,internet is a good place to live on.
Great writing. You come across honest and genuine. Loved reading THE WHOLE THING. LOL, I can see why you snap back at those who obviously haven't. I can also tell you're reading the comments, so that too shows conviction, good job.
One of the other comments mentioned something I thought of as well. You need some 'skin-in-the-game' amigo. You're feeling ridden hard with no upside, but your good nature wants to help the owner out. I feel a partnership is more in order for you to get there, nothing huge to make him feel cut out or gouged, but perhaps a 25% stake would perk your focus up on the daily grind. You'll get up knowing you're building something for both of you instead of just for him.
2nd...you need a big dose of something to change your perception of life. Happened to me, 5 years ago. I'll pm you later and we can chat :)
Keep smiling amigo...you ain't dead yet!
Well technically I am kind of a partner, I already get 30% of whatever this truck makes (after fuel costs are taken out) but when the truck ain't making money I get 30% of jack shit and still have fuel taken out. Too hot to sit in this bitch with no AC going.