Introdution

I sorry this will probably come out way to long, but I have not been able to find any real way to shorten it. I did two years in kindergarden because the school did not think I was ready for first grade yet. When they wanted to keep me another year my mom had me transfered to a Catholic school. Half was through second grade I was kicked out of that school because they thought I was not up to their standards. I went back to public where it was found that my math skills were above way average. In fifth grade it was determined that I had hearing and speech problems along with a kidney that was not growing properly. They also decided that I had a learning disability in English so math had to be limited to give time for the English to catch up. A whole lot of ear surgeries never did fix my hearing so I where a hearing aid. To boost the kidney they said I had to bulk up. I come from a very large family 5 brothers and 5 sisters. To this day when I attend a family function I still have aunts who practically throw desserts on my plate wheather I want it or not, I know they are trying to be helpful and I like dessert. When I was fifthteen I had my first blood clot in my left leg. My arteries where so clogged up that it took one wrong step to freeze up my leg. Before we got the blood clotting under control I had 17 different attacks in the legs and one in the left lung. In high school I had a couple of good teachers who tried to teach me how and why to learn things. But unfortunately the ones I remember most are the ones who treated me as if I was human. Not human, but as if I was. When I was in twelfth grade the special ed teacher sat down with me three weeks before graduation and was telling me that the year and half that I had to still make up for classes not passed well in the hopsital they were going to make that go away. The teacher said they did this sometimes for special ed students who are doing their best. This way ten years from now when I'm in my group home and I feeling depressed I can look up on the wall and Know I onced did by best. I dropped out of high school that day. I passed my GED the following Monday. I enrolled in an accounting course. The Iron Range collapsed. In the declared national emergency my student loan was frozen causing me to leave business school. They needed room for people who could make better use of the opportunity then I could. With a few thousand of people out of work in Minneapolis jobs were hard to come by. I had no work record no real school record just a GED. I got a day labor job in a factory for one day and worked as hard and as well as I could to get a call back for the next day. I did that for about a year when they finally hired me fulltime. In that factory I worked with a lot of paint. I inhaled a lot of it, no not on purpose just part of the job. It was in the air. Everyday after work I would sit in my car shaking my bones would hurt. I would just sit there like that for anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple of hours. After a year I was asked to quit for health reasons. My suggestion Think long and hard before quiting, I could not collect unemployment. If I was fired I could of collected. When I went to look for a job usually I was told I was not what they were looking for. Sometimes They would tell me to come back when I was sober. Then I would have a chance to explain that I was still breathing out the paint fumes from the factory I worked in. Still never got the job. In 1990 after three years on the streets of Minneapolis I got my first disable check. The back pay was large enough I bought an airstream trailer and station wagon with it. The social worker said my lifetime disable was the same as retirement. Me and my wife moved into the trailer and went south for the winter. Despite what social services saying that there is no difference between me and someone retired from 30 years on the job. I found that it felt to me like I was insulting them trying to live their life when I did nothing to get there. I sold the trailer and moved back to Minneapolis into an handicapped housing project. I was sent to a therapist who spent the whole hour telling me how he wished he could sit at home and watch TV all day everyday. He had a house, car payments, a career, and retirement to look forward to. He was allowed to save and invest if he wanted to. He could not understand what it was like not to have those things he did not think it mattered at all. I saw a social worker who kept telling me that work was not what it was all cracked up to be. As depression set in I wound up in a wheel chair sitting at the window watching others go on with their lives and me being left behind. How jenny stayed with me all these years I can't answer. I figured that if I was ever to do any thing I would have to do it on my own, so I tied bungee cords between the frame and the wheels of my chair and just worked my arms until my blood pressure was down enough for me to walk again. I did every legs exercise I could manage. I studied in the library but I still did not have a way back into school. I figured if I could stop paying rent I could save enough money to go school. I bought a van. That did not work out. I would drive out to a free camping spot, but I had to drive back into town a few times a week because social services was afraid i was starving. I was not saving any money. I switched to a motorcycle. I even arranged to deliver a sidecar out to California that would pay for most of the fuel. On my way to pick up the sidecar someone hit my motorcycle. I wound up in the hospital with a broken knee, injured back and a large chunk of helmet missing that I don't remember happening. Two years on crutches. The settlement was enough to pay my way through truckdriving school. I wanted to become a daytrader and I thought a truckdriving job would be a good start. You have a place to stay, enough money to start trading and you can get in and out of any company anywhere. When I drove I drove hard, I was never late not once. At first I would drive for about three weeks and then stop and check into a motel and spend the first day shaking with what felt like my bones hurting. Then it was every week. After six years and more then a million miles. It would happen after every load. I quit driving to start my trading business. I settled Rochester Minnesota home of the Mayo clinic. I figured that maybe if I took control of the hours I worked I would be ok. I made money and was quite good at it. But some days i would be in a position and confusion would set in and I would have no Idea why. I would lose money and then later that evening I would go over things and wonder how I could have done things that bad. Eventually the days of confusing out numbered the days of clarity. I lost my money and had to give up. I took a job driving a clinic shuttle for some of the hotels in town. I work part-time. My legs would swell up everyday I figured it was blood related and I would eat more fiber and exercise more and more. Still the weight would go up and the swelling would continue. I kept thinking that if I just could get back in shape I could make all this work out. Last December I had a pain in my foot that I could not make go away. I figured that with all the exercise I was doing I might of pulled or broke something so I went in to have it looked at they x-rayed and for some reason took blood tests. It came back that I had renal failure. I have been approved for transplant and one of my sisters has been approved for donation. Unfortunately medical assistance doesn't now consider me disabled enough to warrent transplant. On one hand it is nice to hear someone thinks something of me. I do plan on appealing that decision. On the 14 of this month i see my doctor again to find out when and how I will start dialysis. My reason for joining this site is because i have found that I can't handle everything by myself. If you got through all of this god bless. and for those who did not god bless them also.